In Silicon Valley's relentless bidding war for artificial intelligence talent, few names have represented the sheer scale of executive compensation like Andrew Tulloch. Described as the poster child for nine-figure AI spending after reports of a potential $1.5 billion pay package, Tulloch has abruptly resigned from Meta's Superintelligence Labs after less than a year on the job.
Who Is Andrew Tulloch?
Raised in Perth, Australia, Tulloch built an exceptional academic track record studying mathematics at the University of Sydney and the University of Cambridge. He quickly gained legendary status in Silicon Valley as a core architecture mastermind behind large-scale machine learning systems.
Alongside former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, Tulloch co-founded Thinking Machines Lab. When Mark Zuckerberg's initial attempt to acquire Thinking Machines Lab outright was rejected, Meta launched an aggressive poaching campaign, eventually securing Tulloch to lead frontier research within Meta's newly organized Superintelligence Labs.
The $1.5 Billion Compensation Saga
According to an investigative report published by The Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg personally constructed a pay and equity package for Tulloch that, tied to performance milestones and Meta stock growth, could have totaled $1.5 billion over six years.
While Meta spokesperson Andy Stone officially called the WSJ figures "inaccurate and ridiculous," the report cemented Tulloch's reputation as the highest-profile symbol of Silicon Valley's unprecedented war for frontier AI scientists.
Departure on the Heels of Muse Launch
At Meta, Tulloch worked inside the high-security "TBD Lab" under Meta AI chief Alexandr Wang, with his personal website simply stating his mission as "working on superintelligence."
Tulloch timed his resignation for Wednesday, September 9, 2026, exactly one day after Meta publicly rolled out its flagship autonomous agent platform, Muse. Tulloch has not publicly disclosed the reasons for his departure or announced his next venture.
A Day of High-Profile AI Resignations
Tulloch's departure was part of a remarkable 24-hour cycle of executive and researcher movements across the AI landscape:
- Anthropic: Researcher Jacob Coxon resigned publicly to sound alarms regarding unsafe pacing of autonomous model development.
- OpenAI: RLHF pioneer Paul Christiano was named to OpenAI's board of directors and its Safety and Security Committee.
- Meta: Andrew Tulloch concluded his tenure at Superintelligence Labs.
The intense churn highlights that even billion-dollar compensation packages cannot shield frontier AI labs from philosophical divisions, intense burnout, and shifting alignments at the leading edge of superintelligence research.
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