Top AI researcher Andrew Tulloch ditches Meta for Anthropic. Here's what he'll be working on. - Business Insider

Andrew Tulloch has managed less than a year at Meta, which in tenure terms puts him somewhere between a Christmas temp and a parking ticket, and he is now off to Anthropic, starting next week. Not next quarter, not after a graceful handover — next week. That is the corporate equivalent of leaving a restaurant before the starters arrive because the place across the road has better lighting. The last few years of Meta AI coverage have been one long, expensive courtship of exactly this kind of researcher. Tulloch apparently inspected the bouquet and requested a transfer.

He will be joining the inference and performance team, optimising how Anthropic's models are trained and how they respond to users. Which is a grand way of saying the frontier's genuinely pressing problem is making the thing answer faster for less money per thought. Every lab in the business says it is chasing superintelligence; the actual invoice lands with the people tuning latency and squeezing throughput. So a researcher prominent enough to justify a headline gets to spend his days on how quickly the chatbot replies.

Meanwhile the article confirms Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI and Google are locked in what it calls a 'pitched battle for AI researchers'. Four companies, one talent pool, and a bidding war conducted almost entirely through equity vesting schedules. Note what Tulloch is not going to do: alignment research. The safety-forward lab has hired him for inference and performance — the same optimisation work any lab would hand him — which tells you the moral branding and the job description are two separate documents. The battle continues, the researchers rotate, the models get marginally faster — the most expensive game of musical chairs ever staged, and the chairs are all identical.