When Mark Zuckerberg offered roughly $1 billion to acquire Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup built by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, she turned him down. So Zuckerberg did what any billionaire who hears "no" would do. He started hiring her people one by one.

It has worked devastatingly well. Meta has now hired seven founding members of Thinking Machines Lab, Business Insider confirmed this week. The most expensive departure, co-founder Andrew Tulloch, reportedly received a compensation package worth $1.5 billion over six years. If accurate, it is the most expensive individual talent acquisition in the history of the technology industry.

The Raid, Name by Name

The departures read like a casualty report. Tulloch left for Meta Superintelligence Labs in October 2025. Joshua Gross, who built Thinking Machines' flagship product Tinker, followed in March. Mark Jen and Yinghai Lu, both founding engineers, are now at Meta. Tianyi Zhang, a widely cited AI researcher, also defected. Multiple outlets have described Meta's approach as a "full-scale raid."

Other founding members scattered elsewhere. Barret Zoph and Luke Metz returned to OpenAI in January 2026, along with Sam Schoenholz. Zoph was reportedly fired by Murati for "unethical conduct" before immediately rejoining OpenAI. Devendra Chaplot left for Elon Musk's xAI in March. Of the startup's original founding group, the majority are gone.

A Startup Worth $12 Billion Bleeding Out

Thinking Machines Lab raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz in July 2025. By November, it was reportedly in talks for a new round at a $50 billion valuation. Murati's credentials, her tenure running technology development at OpenAI during the ChatGPT era, made the startup one of the most anticipated in AI.

Now, the company that was supposed to challenge the frontier labs has lost the team it was built around. Murati remains as CEO. Soumith Chintala, the creator of PyTorch who left Meta to join Thinking Machines, serves as CTO. John Schulman continues as chief scientist. The headcount has quadrupled to 130. But the founding DNA has been extracted.

Meta's Billion-Dollar AI Restructuring

The talent raid is part of a broader transformation at Meta that has been equal parts ambitious and ruthless. In June 2025, Meta paid $14.3 billion for a 49% stake in Scale AI and installed its 28-year-old founder, Alexandr Wang, as Meta's first Chief AI Officer. Zuckerberg called Wang "the most impressive founder of his generation."

The move triggered the departure of Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist for 12 years and one of the most influential figures in deep learning. Asked to report to Wang, LeCun refused. "You don't tell a researcher what to do. You certainly don't tell a researcher like me what to do," he told the Financial Times. He then raised $1 billion to found AMI Labs in Paris, drawing the founding team "almost entirely from Meta's AI research organisation."

Meta also cut approximately 600 roles from FAIR and AI infrastructure units. Dissolved the AGI Foundations team responsible for the Llama model family after Llama 4's lukewarm reception. And it is firing 8,000 workers on May 20, explicitly framed as reallocating resources to AI.

The Economics of Desperation

The compensation numbers circulating in the AI talent market have reached a scale that defies normal logic. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged signing bonuses of up to $100 million for top researchers. Anthropic is winning what Fortune describes as a "one-sided talent war" against both OpenAI, which retains 67% of its researchers, and Google DeepMind, which retains 78%. DeepMind has responded by enforcing six- to twelve-month non-compete clauses with full salary.

Meta can afford the arms race. The company posted $201 billion in revenue for 2025, with $43.6 billion in free cash flow, and is spending $115 to $135 billion in capital expenditure this year on AI infrastructure. When you have that kind of cash, paying one engineer $1.5 billion over six years is a rounding error.

What This Means

The Thinking Machines Lab raid reveals something important about where AI competition is actually happening. It is not about models or data or compute anymore. It is about the 200 or so people on earth who know how to build the next generation of frontier systems. The talent pool is so small that every hire by one lab is a direct loss for another, and the price of a single researcher has escalated from millions to hundreds of millions to, now, over a billion dollars.

For Murati, the question is whether Thinking Machines can survive losing its founding core. Companies have done it before. Apple survived without its original team. Meta itself survived its mobile pivot. But a startup that raised $2 billion on the strength of its people, and then lost most of those people, faces a credibility problem that no amount of funding can solve.

OpenAI's chief scientist, Mark Chen, described Meta's poaching as "akin to someone breaking into our home." Sam Altman's counter was that Meta "had to go quite far down their list." Seven founding members of a single startup would suggest otherwise.

Reporting by Business Insider, The Next Web, and Times of India.