Meta’s ambition to become a leader in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is facing initial difficulties. The recently established Superintelligence Lab, for which Meta recruited top AI talent with offers of millions of dollars, is now in the news due to the continuous resignations of talented researchers.
Techie Rishabh Agarwal Leaves After Just Five Months
The most prominent name among these resignations is that of AI expert Rishabh Agarwal, who joined Meta in April 2024 and was given a package of one million dollars annually. Just five months later, he announced his separation from the company. Agarwal said that he is looking for “a different kind of risk”. Although he has confirmed his departure, it is not clear whether he will now join a new company, start something on his own or return to academia.
Agarwal’s Statement On Departure
Rishabh mentioned on X about his departure from MSL. He wrote, “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.”
More Resignations Rock Meta’s Superintelligence Lab
Aggarwal is not the only one who has left the Superintelligence Lab. According to a report by Wired, three more researchers have left the team in the last few weeks.
Two of them, Avi Verma and Ethan Knight, have already returned to OpenAI. Verma was with OpenAI before Meta, while Knight has worked at OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, and then Meta, and has now returned to OpenAI.
All of these scientists were hired by Meta in early 2025, when CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s new plan to develop superintelligence. Meta had made large offers to attract talent from rival organizations like Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and xAI as part of this mission.
Agarwal’s Contributions At Meta
During his brief tenure at Meta, Agrawal said he contributed to the post-training of “thinking models”, making reinforcement learning scalable and improving distillation techniques.
Meta’s Response To The Departures
On these resignations, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold told Wired, “During any aggressive hiring process, some people may ultimately decide to stay in their current role. This is normal.”
Who Is Rishabh Agarwal?
Rishabh Agrawal, a computer science and engineering graduate from IIT Bombay, did his PhD from Mila–Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute in Canada. In his early research, he worked on reinforcement learning and its practical uses, including the development of innovative evaluation techniques.
Earlier in his career, he did internships at companies like Saavn, Tower Research Capital, and Waymo. In 2018, he became a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain, where he made significant contributions to deep reinforcement learning and won the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2021. After this, he worked on large language models, reinforcement learning and self-improvement methods at Google DeepMind. He has also served as an Adjunct Professor at McGill University.
Although their next steps are unknown, the untimely departure of Agrawal and other key scientists marks a challenging start for Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.
