{"id":56834,"date":"2025-08-10T03:48:27","date_gmt":"2025-08-10T03:48:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/56834\/"},"modified":"2025-08-10T03:48:27","modified_gmt":"2025-08-10T03:48:27","slug":"perth-tech-genius-andrew-tulloch-reportedly-rejects-billion-dollar-deal-from-mark-zuckerburgs-meta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/56834\/","title":{"rendered":"Perth tech \u2018genius\u2019 Andrew Tulloch reportedly rejects billion-dollar deal from Mark Zuckerburg\u2019s Meta"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">A Perth tech founder and artificial intelligence \u201cextreme genius\u201d has reportedly rejected a billion-dollar deal from Mark Zuckerburg\u2019s Meta.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">Zuckerburg\u2019s offer also reportedly included \u201ctop bonuses\u201d and \u201cextraordinary stock performance\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">But Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told the masthead the offer was \u201cinaccurate and ridiculous\u201d, and that Meta was not interested in acquiring Thinking Machines.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">The Christ Church Grammar alumni \u2014 who was the school\u2019s vice-captain in 2007 \u2014 co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with former OpenAI chief technology officer, Mira Murati, in February.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">The company is reportedly valued at AU$18.5 billion.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/447c7fd463357692aa8aefcbb927a957104f9b94.jpg\" alt=\"University of Sydney graduate Andrew Tulloch.\" class=\"css-16r7l45-StyledImage en5ut4d0\"\/>Camera IconUniversity of Sydney graduate Andrew Tulloch. Credit: Unknown\/Supplied<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">\u201cWe\u2019re building a future where everyone has access to the knowledge and tools to make AI work for their unique needs and goals,\u201d Thinking Machines\u2019 website reads.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">\u201cWe\u2019re building Thinking Machines Lab to make AI systems more widely understood, customisable and generally adaptable.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">\u201cWe are scientists, engineers and builders who\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">Former Facebook executive Mike Vernal told the Journal, \u201c(Mr Tulloch) was definitely known as an extreme genius.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1ix6vwn-StyledParagraph e4e0a020\">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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Perth tech founder and artificial intelligence \u201cextreme genius\u201d has reportedly rejected a billion-dollar deal from Mark Zuckerburg\u2019s&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":56835,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-56834","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=56834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56834\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56835"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=56834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=56834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=56834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}