Meta Nabs Top AI Researcher Andrew Tulloch to Bolster AGI Efforts

Meta has hired Andrew Tulloch, the co-founder of the highly respected AI research group Thinking Machines Lab, in a significant talent acquisition that underscores the company's aggressive push to build Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

The move, which sees a leading mind in AI systems engineering join Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, was confirmed this week and is being seen as a major win for the social media giant in the fierce global competition for elite AI talent. Tulloch is renowned for his expertise in building the large-scale, high-performance computing systems that are essential for training and running next-generation AI models.

Who is Andrew Tulloch?
Andrew Tulloch is a prominent figure in the AI research community. Before co-founding Thinking Machines Lab, he spent nearly eight years at Meta, where he was a key engineering leader within the FAIR team, the same group he is now rejoining. He is highly regarded for his work on open-source AI projects and for his deep understanding of how to optimize hardware and software to push the boundaries of AI capabilities.

His most recent venture, Thinking Machines Lab, was a research-focused organization dedicated to exploring the future of AI systems and the path toward more general and capable artificial intelligence.

A Strategic Hire in the Race for AGI
Tulloch’s return to Meta is a clear strategic move. The company, like its rivals Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, is investing billions in the quest to build AGI—AI systems with human-like reasoning and learning abilities. This quest is fundamentally a battle over computing power. The ability to build and efficiently manage massive clusters of AI chips is just as important as designing the algorithms themselves.

By bringing Tulloch back into the fold, Meta is strengthening the core engineering team responsible for building the very infrastructure upon which its future AGI ambitions will depend. His expertise will be critical as Meta scales up its computing resources to train models that are orders of magnitude larger and more complex than those that exist today.

The hire is another powerful signal of Meta's commitment to being a leader in foundational AI research. In a fiercely competitive market where top talent is scarce, securing a researcher of Tulloch's caliber is a significant victory that will bolster the company's long-term AGI roadmap.