Perth tech ‘genius’ Andrew Tulloch reportedly rejects billion-dollar deal from Mark Zuckerburg’s Meta

A Perth tech founder and artificial intelligence “extreme genius” has reportedly rejected a billion-dollar deal from Mark Zuckerburg’s Meta.

Andrew Tulloch reportedly turned down the $1.5 billion offer from Zuckerburg to buy his AI company, Thinking Machines Lab, earlier this year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Zuckerburg’s offer also reportedly included “top bonuses” and “extraordinary stock performance”.

But Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the masthead the offer was “inaccurate and ridiculous”, and that Meta was not interested in acquiring Thinking Machines.

Mr Tulloch spent about 11 years at Meta, working his way up as a distinguished engineer, before moving to its rival company, OpenAI, in 2023.

The Christ Church Grammar alumni — who was the school’s vice-captain in 2007 — co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI chief technology officer, Mira Murati, in February.

The company is reportedly valued at AU$18.5 billion.

“We’re building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals,” Thinking Machines’ website reads.

“We’re building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally adaptable.

“We are scientists, engineers and builders who’ve created some of the most widely used AI products, including ChatGPT and Character.ai, open-weights models like Mistral, as well as popular open source projects like PyTorch, OpenAI Gym, Fairseq and Segment Anything.”

Former Facebook executive Mike Vernal told the Journal, “(Mr Tulloch) was definitely known as an extreme genius.”

Mr Tulloch graduated from the University of Sydney in 2011 with First Class Honours before studying a Masters of Mathematical Statistics, Statistics and Machine Learning at Cambridge University.