Big tech companies are poaching each other’s AI talent to be on top of the AI game in 2025. And Meta’s name comes first. Meta is doing all it can to attract the best talent to strengthen its Superintelligence AI team. It has already hired 50 (20+ from Meta, 13 from Google, 3 from Apple, 3 from Grok, and 2 from Anthropic) from its rivals. Just when all of this is happening, Rishabh Agarwal, a high-profile, high-salaried ($1 million) AI researcher, leaves Meta. What’s so surprising about the exit is that he left the company only after 5 months of joining. What could have caused him to take this tough call? Learn more.
What Happened?
Rishabh Agarwal, one of Meta’s top hires this year, joined the company in April 2024. Meta hired him with a whopping $1 million salary package. He worked for about 5 months with Meta and said goodbye to the company on August 25.
Who Is Rishabh Agarwal?
Before Rishabh Agarwal, a $1 million hire from Meta, he was a talented AI researcher who worked for Google for over 7 years. Here’s the timeline of his career:
- He interned at Saavn, Tower Research Capital, and Waymo from 2016 to 2018.
- Hired by Google Brain in 2018 as a Senior Research Scientist.
- In 2023, he moved to DeepMind (Google’s advanced AI company) to work as a Staff Research Scientist.
- He then became an Adjunct Professor at McGill University in Canada in 2024.
- Recently, in April 2024, he joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab as a Research Scientist.
Education:
- Rishabh Agarwal studied Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Bombay.
- Got his PhD in AI at Mila (Quebec, Canada), a world-famous AI research institute.
Awards:
He won the Best Paper Award at NeurIPS 2021, one of the world’s largest AI conferences.
What Was He Working on at Meta?
Two months ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced (On July 30, 2025) the Superintelligence Labs (MSL). Meta created a Superintelligence Lab to build superintelligent AI. For the same, Meta hired Rishabh Agarwal, who worked on:
Post-training for thinking models, meaning making the AI models smarter once they are trained.
Scaling reinforcement learning methods, meaning training the AI to learn from the trial and error method, but on a large scale.
Improving distillation techniques involves creating smaller, more innovative, and faster AI models by compressing the big models.
Why Is This a Big Deal for Meta?
Meta went on a hiring spree early this year, spending billions of dollars to poach talent from its rivals. It hired people from Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic. Rishabh was one of those “star hires” for Meta this year.
However, things are quickly taking a U-turn for Meta and its new hires after the company announced a team reshuffle into four divisions. Rishabh Agarwal was not the only one who left the company; there are more.
- Avi Verma → Left OpenAI → hired by Meta → now back to OpenAI.
- Ethan Knight → Left OpenAI → moved to Elon Musk’s xAI → hired by Meta → again back to OpenAI.
The best talents leaving the company in such a short span is making people wonder why. This is concerning for Meta, given its mission to build the world’s most powerful AI.
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.”
Why Did Rishabh Agarwal Leave Meta?
On August 25, Rishabh wrote on the platform ‘X’ saying he wanted “to take on a different kind of risk”…
“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.”
Reasons for leaving are still unclear because Rishabh didn’t mention whether he was joining another company, starting his own company, or pursuing a different passion.
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