Meta hires five Thinking Machines Lab founders including a reported $1.5 billion engineer

Meta has hired five founding members of Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, after Zuckerberg's reported $1 billion acquisition offer was rejected. The most notable hire, co-founder Andrew Tulloch, received a compensation package reportedly worth $1.5 billion over six years. The talent raid is part of a sweeping AI restructuring at Meta that includes a $14.3 billion Scale AI investment, Alexandr Wang's appointment as chief AI officer, Yann LeCun's departure after 12 years, 600 FAIR research cuts, and the launch of Meta Superintelligence Labs. The first model from this new division, Muse Spark, launched on April 8 as a closed-source multimodal reasoning model, breaking Meta's open-source Llama tradition. The broader AI talent market has reached extreme compensation levels, with signing bonuses up to $100 million and individual packages potentially reaching billions.