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IIT Bombay graduate quits ₹8 crore salary job at Meta in just 5 months to...
Reports say that Rishabh Agarwal had a million-dollar pay package at Meta, but he chose to quit the job for a “risk.”
It is not every day that you see people quitting million-dollar jobs. Yet, Rishabh Agarwal, who joined Mark Zuckerberg's Meta AI’s superintelligence team just five months ago, has reportedly resigned from the company, letting go of his seven-figure salary in a bid to pursue a “different kind of risk.”
The scientist took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to announce that he is indeed leaving Meta. 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 pitch from Mark Zuckerberg and Alexander Wang (Meta’s chief AI officer) to build a superintelligence team was indeed very compelling, but ultimately he ended up following Mark's own advice, which says, “In a world that's changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”
Rishab Agarwal Details His Major Milestones At Meta
Rishabh Agarwal also detailed the major tasks and accomplishments he held at Meta. He said that he helped push an 8-bit dense model to near Deepseek R1 performance with RL scaling. Next, he used synthetic data in mid-training to warm-start RL. He also helped in developing better on-policy distillation methods.
For the uninitiated, Meta's superintelligence team has been one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's main focuses over the last few months, and Meta has also reportedly offered multi-million-dollar contracts to many in order to hire top talent from rivals.
IIT Bombay Graduate, Worked At Google Prior To Joining Meta
Rishabh Agarwal, prior to joining Meta, had already been working with several big-name companies in tech including internships at Tower Research Capital, Saavn, Waymo, and then came the full-time roles at Google Brain (senior research scientist), Google DeepMind (staff research scientist) and then Meta Superintelligence Labs (Research scientist).
Rishabh Agarwal studied at IIT Bombay for his graduation in computer science engineering (scored AIR 33 in JEE exam) and subsequently went on to get a doctorate in computer science from Mila-Quebec AI Institute. As the most recent part of his career switch, he moved to Meta in April 2025 earlier this year, for which Meta was reportedly compensating him with a million dollar salary.
