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Mira Murat's loyal colleague rejects $1.5 billion from Mark Zuckerberg: Thank you for the offer, but I don't accept it!

2025-08-03 22:29:06Kosova&Bota SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Mira Murat's loyal colleague rejects $1.5 billion from Mark Zuckerberg:
Mark Zuckerberg and Mira Murati / Editing

In an effort to make up for lost ground in the race for dominance in artificial intelligence, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg contacted OpenAI's former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, a few months ago, suggesting that she buy her new startup, "Thinking Machines Lab."

When she refused, the head of "Meta" counterattacked. Over the following weeks, he contacted more than a dozen employees at the Albanian's company, which has about 50 staff, to see if they would leave Murat. His main target was Andrew Tallak, a prominent researcher and co-founder of "Thinking Machines".

To entice him, Zuckerberg reportedly offered him a compensation package that, with bonuses and stock options, could reach up to $1.5 billion, over at least 6 years. This is confirmed by people familiar with the case, cited in a new report by the "Wall Street Journal". To put this into perspective, Zuckerberg's offer for Mira Murati herself was $1 billion.

Talak refused. And none of his colleagues left.

Meta spokesman Andy Stone called the news of the offer inaccurate and "ridiculous", saying that the amount of any compensation depends on the performance of the shares. He added that Meta is not interested in buying "Thinking Machines".

Loyalty Beyond Money

Even by Silicon Valley standards, the rejection of nine-digit amounts is a rare occurrence. But, as the competition for talent in artificial intelligence is heating up, it turns out that even the "most stuffed pockets" are not always enough.

Some researchers act as freelancers, but many of them choose to stay loyal to their leaders – figures who are almost mythical in the tech space. The idiosyncratic cultures of different startups reinforce this sense of engagement. At the same time, companies are already engaging more in protecting against the constant "fishing" of talent.

OpenAI and companies founded by former executives, such as Murat's, have been a constant target of Zuckerberg's recruitment efforts. Since the early stages of the AI race, pioneers in the field have promised to participate in a historic mission: the creation of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that is, a system smarter than humans in almost all tasks.

OpenAI, with founders including Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Ilya Shustskyver, has given this mission an almost religious character, placing it under a non-profit charter, aimed at "benefiting humanity".

Competition with OpenAI, Anthropic, and SSI

Meta has already contacted more than 100 OpenAI employees, employing at least ten. On July 25, Zuckerberg appointed researcher Shengjia Zhao, with three years of experience at OpenAI, to lead the new "superintelligence" team.

OpenAI employees who refused to leave did so because they believe the company is closer to AGI, prefer smaller teams, and don't want their achievements to be leveraged for products driven primarily by ad revenue.

Zuckerberg has also retired from Anthropic, a $170 billion startup founded by Dario Amonde, a former OpenAI executive who took senior scientists with him when he left 5 years ago. Anthropic's 7 co-founders all remained at the company and have strong connections through the "effective altruism" movement, which was concerned from the beginning about the dangers of unlimited AI. Some of them even lived in a co-op in San Francisco.

From Anthropic, Meta has hired two former directors – Joel Pobar and Anton Bakhtin – who had previously worked at Meta. Ilya Shutskiver, co-founder of the startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI), built the company to make it extremely difficult to "disconnect" from its employees. Unlike Amonde, he has not brought in many former OpenAI associates, preferring to train new, unknown technologists, but with fresh ideas.

Employees are discouraged from mentioning SSI on their LinkedIn profiles to avoid aggressive recruitment. Zuckerberg has reportedly even suggested buying SSI, but it has been rejected.

Who is Mira Murati and her loyalists

Murat, who spent 6 years at OpenAI and left in September, has gathered a "team of apostles" around her. Originally from Albania, she helped launch OpenAI's first product and ultimately led almost every department of the company as Chief Technology Officer. She is known for her emotional intelligence and lack of ego – elements that have strengthened her team's loyalty.

In Thinking Machines, it has adopted a similar "horizontal" organizational structure, where even senior researchers are referred to simply as "members of the technical staff", as was the case in the legendary "Bell Labs".

When she founded her company last February, more than 20 former OpenAI colleagues joined her, including co-founder John Schulman, one of the architects of ChatGPT, who had previously worked on Anthropic. Many of Murat's researchers come from OpenAI's "post-training" group, the group that trained the models to communicate with humans.

The mission of "Thinking Machines" remains largely unknown, even to some investors who recently invested $2 billion. According to Murat, the company is building "multimodal AI that naturally interacts with the world" and is ready to launch its first product in the coming months. The company is located on a quiet street in San Francisco's Mission neighborhood, a few blocks from OpenAI's offices.

Prior to founding the Thinking Machines Lab, Murati served at OpenAI, the company that developed and pioneered technologies such as ChatGPT, DALL· E and Codex. Her contributions have been significant in bringing AI to the masses, influencing industries such as education, healthcare, design, and programming.

Murat was not only a technical leader, but also a strategic visionary. She emphasized the importance of aligning with security and responsible development, while pushing OpenAI to consider the social implications of powerful AI systems.

Murati is often referred to as the "AI brain" behind the company's ambitious projects, and her colleagues praise her quiet determination and clarity of thought. She combined mechanical precision with a human-centered approach and paved the way for her new venture.

In 2025, she spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, emphasizing: "Artificial Intelligence without values is intelligence without conscience." This statement sparked an international debate over the ethics of artificial intelligence, so she is advising the European Commission on new regulations around artificial intelligence – something extremely rare for a startup founder.

Mira Murat's leadership is internationally recognized. She has been listed on Time magazine's list of the 100 Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence (2024) and Fortune's 100 Most Powerful Women in Business (2023). With the increase in the number of Thinking Machines Lab employees and the rejection of billion-dollar proposals by Meta, Murati has already earned her place not only as the creator of artificial intelligence, but also as one of the key determinants of its future.

Who is her associate Andrew Tallak?

Talak, who appears as the co-founder of Thinking Machines, was at the center of an ongoing recruitment effort by both Zuckerberg and the new head of Meta's superintelligence lab, Alexander Wang. Both bombarded him with messages.

Originally from Australia, he graduated from the University of Sydney with the highest grades among science students. He worked for 18 months in Facebook's machine learning department before moving to Cambridge for graduate studies and then returning to California to join Facebook AI Research. He rose to become a prominent engineer – one of the highest technical positions in the company.

In 2016, OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, had tried to hire him as one of the first employees, telling Elon Musk in an email that Tallak earned $800,000 a year at Facebook and would most likely ask for a pay raise. At the time, OpenAI offered $175,000 in base salary and $125,000 in bonuses.

"Andrew is very close to saying yes, but he is concerned about the pay cut," Brockman wrote on February 21. He didn't join OpenAI then. He joined 7 years later, when ChatGPT had already taken over the world and the startup's value had increased significantly.


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