AI scientist Rishabh Agarwal leaves Meta’s Superintelligence Lab after just five months, citing a desire for new challenges. This follows other recent departures to competitors like OpenAI, raising questions about Meta’s superintelligence program.
There has been a departure from Meta’s Superintelligence Lab, which houses some of the well-known hires from companies like Apple, Google, and OpenAI. Five months after allegedly accepting a million-dollar salary, AI scientist Rishabh Agarwal has announced his departure in order to take “a different kind of risk.” In a social media statement announcing his resignation, Agarwal said he is looking for new challenges after working with Meta, Google Brain, and DeepMind.
“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,” Agarwal stated in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
“The pitch from Mark Zuckerberg 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”,” he said.
Who Is Rishabh Agarwal?
Prior to joining the Superintelligence Lab at Meta, Rishabh Agarwal had established a remarkable career. He graduated from IIT Bombay then went on to the Mila–Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute to obtain a PhD in computer science. Before becoming a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain in 2018, he began his career as an intern at Saavn, Tower Research Capital, and Waymo. Later, Agarwal moved to Google DeepMind, where he worked on developing huge language models using self-improvement and reinforcement learning techniques. In April 2025, his relocation to Meta’s new lab was viewed as a significant victory for the business.
He joined the Meta SuperIntelligence Labs in April, with a salary of about $1 million, as per reports. Rishabh Agarwal is also an Adjunct Professor at the McGill University.
Other Researchers Also Quit
Agarwal is not the only well-known departure. At least three researchers have reportedly departed the company in recent weeks, according to a Wired story, with two of them already joining competitor OpenAI. Avi Verma, who joined Meta after previously working at OpenAI, is among the returning employees. The second is Ethan Knight, who was employed at OpenAI before joining Elon Musk’s xAI and then joining Meta before returning. These departures are especially noteworthy because they are from among the top-tier appointments that Meta hired as part of its aggressive effort to develop “superintelligence,” a program that CEO Mark Zuckerberg only two months ago disclosed.
Reports have suggested that the new recruits were reportedly offered multi-million-dollar compensation packages in an effort to aggressively target talent from competitors like Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and xAI.