Rishabh Agarwal, a researcher at Meta’s Superintelligence Lab (MSL), has stepped down only months after joining. Sharing the news on X, 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.”

Agarwal confirmed his departure but did not share where he is headed next.

Agarwal’s exit follows a series of resignations from Meta’s AI team. A report by Wired said that at least three researchers have left the lab in recent weeks. Two of them, Avi Verma and Ethan Knight, have rejoined OpenAI.

These exits are notable because all three were part of Meta’s big hiring push earlier this year. The company had recruited top names from DeepMind, OpenAI, and xAI, offering multi-million-dollar packages for its ambitious “superintelligence” project, announced just two months ago by Mark Zuckerberg.

During his short stay at Meta, Agarwal said he worked on post-training for advanced models, including scaling reinforcement learning and refining distillation methods.

Responding to the resignations, Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold told Wired: “During an intense recruiting process, some people will decide to stay in their current job rather than starting a new one. That’s normal.”

Who is Rishabh Agarwal?

Agarwal studied Computer Science at IIT Bombay and later pursued a PhD at Mila– Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute in Canada, where he focused on reinforcement learning.

His career began with internships at Saavn, Tower Research Capital, and Waymo. In 2018, he joined Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist, where he worked for five years and won the NeurIPS 2021 Best Paper Award for his contributions to deep reinforcement learning.

He later moved to DeepMind, focusing on large language models, before Meta brought him on board in April 2024 with a million-dollar offer. Apart from industry roles, he also serves as an Adjunct Professor at McGill University.

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