The race for AI dominance is seeing no truce as Meta ropes in Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, in a high-profile move. Tulloch’s return to Meta after stints at OpenAI and TML comes amid Mark Zuckerberg’s aggressive restructuring of its AI Superintelligence Lab under the MSL division, backed by a planned $72B infrastructure outlay this year.
Thinking Machines, launched in February with $2B funding and a 30‑member elite team, had already made waves with its first product when Tulloch exited. Reports suggest Meta pursued him with a massive multi‑year package, signalling the scale of resources the company is ready to deploy to regain ground lost to rivals like OpenAI, Google DeepMind’s Gemini, and Anthropic.
The war for top AI talent shows no sign of slowing. Companies are not just competing on compute power or model size, but also on the brains driving the innovation. In this intense zero-sum game, every strategic hire can potentially accelerate breakthroughs and tilt the market narrative.
Whether Meta’s talent blitz will help it close the gap or leap ahead remains to be seen. In an AI arena where speed, research depth, and execution converge, the next leadership shift may come not from the biggest data centers, but from the smartest minds steering them. If Meta’s hiring spree adds to create AI expertise critical mass and then fused with it’s compute muscle, it may just do the trick. Time would finally be the best judge.
IN THE AI ENDGAME, THE MINDS YOU WIN MAY MATTER MORE THAN THE MODELS YOU BUILD.