TLDR: Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, rejected a $1 billion acquisition offer from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Following the refusal, Zuckerberg launched an aggressive campaign to poach key talent, including co-founder Andrew Tulloch, with offers up to $1.5 billion, which were also declined. The startup, founded in early 2025, recently secured $2 billion in funding and is a central figure in the escalating battle for top AI talent.
In a high-stakes maneuver within the fiercely competitive artificial intelligence landscape, Mira Murati, the 36-year-old former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI, has reportedly rebuffed a substantial $1 billion acquisition offer from Meta Platforms, led by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Murati, a recognized tech prodigy, co-founded her AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab, in early 2025 alongside renowned machine learning expert Andrew Tulloch. The nascent company has quickly become a focal point in the industry, recently securing a significant $2 billion funding round from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Following Murati’s refusal to sell, Zuckerberg reportedly initiated a ‘full-scale raid’ on Thinking Machines Lab, personally approaching more than a dozen of the startup’s approximately 50 employees, many of whom are former OpenAI staffers. The most prominent target of this aggressive recruitment drive was Andrew Tulloch, a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab and a key figure in the development of PyTorch, a foundational tool in AI research. Meta’s offer to Tulloch was staggering: a six-year compensation package that could cumulatively reach an unprecedented $1.5 billion, contingent on Meta’s stock performance and various bonuses.
Despite the eye-watering sum, Tulloch, who previously worked at Meta from 2012 to 2023 and contributed to GPT-4’s pre-training and reasoning models during his stint at OpenAI, chose to decline the offer, opting to remain with Thinking Machines Lab. This rejection underscores the intense loyalty and belief in the vision cultivated within Murati’s startup, even in the face of unparalleled financial incentives from a tech giant like Meta.
Meta’s pursuit of Thinking Machines Lab’s talent is part of a broader, aggressive strategy by Mark Zuckerberg to assemble a ‘Superintelligence dream team.’ The company has been actively poaching top AI researchers and engineers from leading firms such as OpenAI, Apple, and Google, as well as other AI startups like Dario Amodei’s Anthropic. This talent acquisition spree also saw Meta acquire a 49% stake in enterprise-focused AI startup Scale AI for $14.3 billion, with Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang joining Meta to lead its new superintelligence unit. The Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL) now encompasses the company’s foundational AI model teams, product groups, and its long-standing Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) division, co-led by Wang and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman.
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Mira Murati’s journey includes prior roles at Goldman Sachs and Tesla before her significant contributions to artificial intelligence at OpenAI, where she rose to prominence. Her current leadership at Thinking Machines Lab, and its resilience against Meta’s formidable advances, positions the startup as a critical player in the ongoing battle for AI supremacy, highlighting the immense value placed on top-tier AI talent and innovative ventures in the current technological landscape.
