Aussie who rejected $1.5 billion job offer’s outrageous ATAR

An Aussie AI genius who reportedly knocked back a billion-dollar offer to work at Facebook comes from a famous family. His school marks will leave you stunned.

EXCLUSIVE

A former elite Perth schoolboy who reportedly turned down a billion-dollar offer from Mark Zuckerberg has been described as a “modest” man.

News.com.au has discovered the impressive family stock of leading AI mind Andrew Tulloch, who made global headlines for rejecting a reported $1.5 billion payday to work for Meta.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, responded to say the description of the offer first reported by the Wall Street Journal “is inaccurate and ridiculous”.

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Andrew John Tulloch, the Australian AI whiz, during his school days. Picture: Supplied

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It can be revealed Mr Tulloch, a University of Sydney graduate now in his mid 30s labelled an “extreme genius” by an ex-colleague, is the grandson of former New Zealand prime minister Sir John Marshall.

His father, retired doctor Alastair Tulloch, was in 2020 made a member of the Order of Australia for significant service to medicine, urology, and the community of Claremont, WA.

The former long-term Town of Claremont councillor Dr Tulloch AM declined to comment on his son’s career when contacted by news.com.au, saying Andrew was a “modest” man.

Mr Tulloch is a co-founder at Thinking Machines Lab. Picture: Supplied

Now based in California, Andrew Tulloch this year co-founded the AI start-up Thinking Machines Lab a venture that already has a reported value of $18.5 billion.

Another of the five co-founders is Mira Murati, whom Mr Tulloch previously worked with at OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT. Before that the Australian spent 11 years at Facebook’s AI research arm.

Ms Murati wrote on X last month that Thinking Machines Lab aimed “to empower humanity through advancing collaborative general intelligence”.

“We’re building multimodal AI that works with how you naturally interact with the world – through conversation, through sight, through the messy way we collaborate.”

Mr Tulloch’s work at OpenAI included pre-training for ChatPGT4o and 4.5, and reasoning for the o series, his LinkedIn profile states.

Responding to the Journal’s article on July 31, Meta communication director Andy Stone wrote on X the company “made offers only to a handful of people at TML and while there was one sizeable offer, the details are off”.

“At the end of the day, this all begs the question who is spinning this narrative and why.”

He had specialised in machine learning. Picture: Supplied

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At Facebook, according to a CV seen by news.com.au, Mr Tulloch built machine learning platforms “capable of learning multi-billion dimensional weight vectors trained from tens of billions of impressions per day in real time, distributed across hundreds of servers, and predicting millions of examples every second”.

Mr Tulloch graduated from prestigious Christ Church Grammar School in 2007 with a TER of 99.95 and placed second out of 10,000 West Australian students in the final school exams.

He was the school Dux and served as a prefect, as the captain of mock trials and debating and represented Australia in the international Chemistry Olympiad competition.

The Year 12 student was awarded a silver medal at the chemistry competition held in Moscow, ranking 42nd overall and first in the southern hemisphere.

Andrew Tulloch (centre) with schoolmates at Christ Church Grammar in 2007. Picture: Richard Hatherly

A 2014 article posted to the school website recounts former Australian prime minister John Howard attending an event to promote his book on Sir Robert Menzies.

The event was co-presented by the Centre for Ethics, whose director Canon Frank Sheehan was quoted speaking about a white hat he was seen wearing.

“Interestingly, the hat belongs to former Christ Church parent Margaret Tulloch, whose husband Alistair (sic) is pictured alongside me,” he said.

“Sir Menzies presented this hat to his friend Sir John Marshall, the Prime Minister of New Zealand. Sir John was Margaret’s father.”

The article noted Alastair and Margaret Tulloch were the parents of 2007 graduate Andrew Tulloch.

In a statement, the Chirst Church Grammar School Old Boys’ Association said it did not wish to make a comment about the success of its alumnus.

“The Old Boys’ Association takes great pride in recognising and celebrating the achievements of members within our community, many of whom continue to make significant contributions across a wide range of fields,” it said.

“While we acknowledge the interest surrounding this matter, the Old Boys’ Association will not be making any comment at this time.”

Meta has been focusing on building its AI team. Picture: Julien De Rosa/AFP

During his uni days he graduated with first class honours and the university medal in mathematics at Sydney uni in 2011, with the highest GPA in the Faculty of Science.

Afterwards he completed a masters in mathematical statistics and machine learning at the University of Cambridge in 2013 and 2014.

Mr Tulloch also worked part-time as an analyst at Goldman Sachs while studying in Sydney, developing “machine learning models to improve trading algorithms for the optimal execution of market orders”.

Meta has pumped billions into its AI teams and has reportedly been attempting to poach leading minds from rivals as it seeks to establish itself as the frontrunner in the game-changing technology.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman said in June that Meta had offered US$100 million bonuses ($155 million) to his employees in a bid to win over talent for its generative AI teams.

Mark Zuckerberg said he believes superintelligence was “close”. Picture: Shawn Thew/AFP

Mr Altman also said Mr Zuckerberg’s company offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers.

“I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them up on that,” he said.

Meta did secure the services of OpenAI researcher Yuanzhi Li in July, after appointing Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang as its head of “superintelligence”.

Mr Zuckerberg last month said in a staff memo that the rest of the 2020s would be a key period in “determining the path this technology will take”.

“Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves,” he wrote.

“The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight.”

Originally published as Aussie who rejected $1.5 billion job offer’s outrageous ATAR