Indian Techie Quits Meta Just 5 Months After Mark Zuckerberg Hired Him at 8 Crore Salary; Here’s Why

Rishabh Agarwal, a well-known AI researcher from India, has announced his resignation from Meta’s SuperIntelligence Labs just five months after joining the company. The IIT Bombay graduate was hired earlier this year by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg at a reported salary of $1 million.

Agarwal was one of the many researchers poached from Google DeepMind, as tech giants Meta, Google, and OpenAI compete fiercely in the race for advanced artificial intelligence.

This is my last week at @AIatMeta. It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density. But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.…

— Rishabh Agarwal (@agarwl_) August 25, 2025

Announces exit on X

On August 25, Agarwal shared the news of his exit in a post on X (formerly Twitter). Calling it a “tough decision,” he said: “This is my last week at @AIatMeta. It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density. But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.”

He added that the offer from Meta was very appealing, but ultimately, he wanted to follow his own path. “The pitch from Mark and @alexandr_wang to build in the Superintelligence team was incredibly compelling. But I ultimately choose to follow Mark’s own advice: ‘In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk’.”

During his brief time at Meta, Agarwal said he and his team “did push the frontier on post-training for ‘thinking’ models.”

Who is Rishabh Agarwal?

Rishabh Agarwal is an alumnus of IIT Bombay, where he studied computer science and engineering. As an undergraduate, he worked on research related to “approximating the evaluation function in Scrabble.”

He later pursued a PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Mila, Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute in Canada. Agarwal started his career with internships at Saavn, where he worked in the Search and Algorithms division, and at Tower Research Capital, where he worked with the Algorithm Trading team.

In June 2018, he joined Google Brain as a senior research scientist. His work there was focused on deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), and he stayed with the team until 2023.

Afterwards, he moved to Google DeepMind, where he spent two years working on large language models (LLMs). His research there included reinforcement learning, self-improvement, and distillation methods.

Move to Meta SuperIntelligence Labs

In April this year, Agarwal was recruited by Mark Zuckerberg to join Meta’s new SuperIntelligence Labs. According to reports, he was offered a salary package worth around $1 million (8.3 crores rupees). The move came as part of Meta’s push to strengthen its AI research team and compete with Google and OpenAI in the superintelligence race.

Along with his industry work, Agarwal is also an adjunct professor at McGill University, Canada.

Agarwal’s decision to leave Meta in such a short span has raised eyebrows in the tech industry. His exit highlights how competitive the AI space has become, with researchers frequently moving between companies in search of new challenges.

For Meta, it also means losing a high-profile researcher at a time when the company is investing heavily in AI through its SuperIntelligence Labs project. Moreover, Agarwal has not yet revealed his next role but hinted at taking a new kind of risk. His words suggest that he might be moving towards a different project or even an independent venture.