Aussie’s $2.1b Meta salary wasn’t enough. So he left for a rival

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The Australians on the ground in San Francisco can talk about little else this week. AI’s hottest commodity Andrew Tulloch, who grew up in Perth and studied at the University of Sydney, has left Meta after less than 12 months.

The numbers are mind-boggling: Tulloch’s full package with Meta was reportedly worth $US1.5 billion ($2.1 billion) over six years − a figure a Meta spokesman has called “inaccurate and ridiculous”. If true, or even close to true, it would have made a bloke from Perth the highest-paid employee in the history of the technology industry.

He’s now left for a rival before his first anniversary, joining Claude maker Anthropic, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Tulloch previously spent 11 years at Facebook and was a pivotal engineer on PyTorch, the open-source framework Meta’s entire AI strategy is built on.

He then co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, which raised $US2 billion in seed funding. Meta reportedly tried to buy the whole company. When that didn’t work, it went after him instead.

His resume is aggressively Aussie: Christ Church Grammar, a perfect 99.95, school vice-captain, first XI cricket, then a university medal in advanced mathematics at Sydney and a master’s at Cambridge. A brief stop at Goldman Sachs in Sydney before he left.

He timed this exit neatly. Tulloch had been holding off until Meta shipped Muse, its new AI agent, which landed the day before he announced he was going. Meta shares slipped on the news.

“The smartest person in a place full of them,” is how one Aussie here describes Tulloch. “Definitely an extreme genius,” is how a former Facebook executive put it to Forbes.

He lands at Anthropic as the AI firm heads towards an October listing at a reported target near $US2 trillion, working on how efficiently customers reach models running in data centres.

So a man from Perth is central to answering the same question everyone is arguing about right now: what it really costs to run all of this.

Tulloch is perhaps the peak example of Australia’s “brain drain” problem, along with the likes of Tristan Buckmaster, the Australian mathematician who is taking on OpenAI. The Assistant Minister for Science and Technology Andrew Charlton met with Tulloch on his US tour this month.

“Australia has a real reputation for generating the people who are the most capable in this space,” Charlton said on Monday. “And yeah, quite frankly, we want some of them to come home.”

Good luck. The going rate is about a billion and a half.

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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.