# Meta's Superintelligence Labs raids Thinking Machines, goes closed
> Five Thinking Machines founders hired, one on a reported $1.5bn package; Muse Spark breaks with the open-source Llama tradition

**Meta:** type: story · date: 2026-04-08 · heads: Dinheiro de quem, A mudança silenciosa · 6 takes · 4 lenses · 3 regions

## Summary

[Meta AI](/pt/entity/meta-ai)'s Superintelligence Labs, built around the $14.3bn Scale AI stake and led by [Alexandr Wang](/pt/entity/alexandr-wang) with Nat Friedman, escalated the talent war by hiring five founding members of [Mira Murati](/pt/entity/mira-murati)'s Thinking Machines Lab after Murati rejected a ~$1bn acquisition offer. Co-founder Andrew Tulloch reportedly received a $1.5bn-over-six-years package; Meta disputes the figure as stock-contingent. Not all defected to Meta, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz returned to [Openai](/pt/entity/openai). The lab's first output, Muse Spark (8 April), is a closed multimodal reasoning model now powering Meta AI across its apps and Ray-Ban glasses, a deliberate break with the open-weight [Llama](/pt/entity/meta-ai) tradition.

## By the numbers

- $14.3bn, Meta's 49% non-voting Scale AI stake.
- 5, Thinking Machines founders hired by Meta.
- ~$1.5bn / 6 years, reported Tulloch package (Meta disputes).
- 8 Apr 2026, Muse Spark released (closed-source).

## Why it matters

Meta is converting cash into scarce researchers at unprecedented prices and walking away from open weights at the top, a strategic reversal that thins the open-source frontier and signals the IP from these hires stays proprietary. The bidding war redraws comp benchmarks across every lab.

## What to watch

- Whether Llama continues as an open line or is fully superseded by closed Muse models.
- Retention: how many expensive hires stay through vesting.
- Whether the closed pivot dents Meta's open-ecosystem goodwill.

## Regional takes (batched by bias / lens)

### unlabelled
- **Meta AI (Llama 4 blog)** (United States, en) — Meta's own Llama blog, the open-weight lineage that the closed Muse Spark release breaks from, useful as the baseline for the strategy shift.
  Source: https://ai.meta.com/blog/llama-4-multimodal-intelligence/
- **Built In** (United States, en) — 
  Source: https://builtin.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-superintelligence-labs
- **eWEEK** (United States, en) — 
  Source: https://www.eweek.com/news/meta-internal-ai-key-models/

### talent / strategy
- **TechCrunch** (United States, en) — Reports co-founder Andrew Tulloch leaving Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab for Meta Superintelligence Labs under Alexandr Wang, part of a multi-person raid after Murati rejected a ~$1bn acquisition offer.
  > "Thinking Machines Lab co-founder Andrew Tulloch heads to Meta."
  Source: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/11/thinking-machines-lab-co-founder-andrew-tulloch-heads-to-meta/

### AI talent economics
- **Calcalist (CTech)** (Israel, en) — Frames Tulloch's reported $1.5bn-over-six-years package as the marker of how distorted the AI talent market has become; notes Meta disputes the figure as 'inaccurate and ridiculous' since it is stock-contingent.
  > "The $1.5 billion engineer: Meta's latest hire shows how costly the AI talent race has become."
  Source: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/skr56vtpgl

### industry
- **The Next Web** (Netherlands, en) — Reports Meta hiring five founding members of Thinking Machines Lab; notes some defectors (Zoph, Metz, Schoenholz) instead returned to OpenAI, and that the IP these hires produce will not be open-sourced.
  > "Meta hires five Thinking Machines Lab founders, including a reported $1.5 billion engineer."
  Source: https://thenextweb.com/news/meta-thinking-machines-lab-talent-raid

## Across the graph
- Related: [[open-vs-closed-frontier-2026]], [[openai-confidential-ipo-trillion-2026]]
- Entities: Meta AI, Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, Alexandr Wang, Mira Murati

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Canonical: https://rbtfl.xyz/pt/n/meta-superintelligence-talent-raid-2026