IIT Bombay graduate joined Meta with million dollar salary, quit in 5 months – Who is he?

Rishabh Agarwal was hired by Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg just a few months back to join a team of AI researchers for his ambitious SuperIntelligence Labs at a million dollar salary. He was among the many Google DeepMind employees who were poached by Meta amid an ongoing AI race between tech giants.

Cut to August 25, Agarwal announced that this was his last week at Meta SuperIntelligence Labs.

Indian AI researcher quits Meta

In a post on X, Rishabh Agarwal called his resignation from Meta a ‘tough decision.

“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 said.

“The pitch from Mark 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”,” the Indian techie added.

During the five months of his tenure at Meta, Agarwal and his team “did push the frontier on post-training for “thinking” models,” he said.

Who is Rishabh Agarwal? Education, jobs, salary

Five months ago, Mark Zuckerberg poached Indian techie Rishabh Agarwal from Sundar Pichai’s Google DeepMind to join him at the Meta SuperIntelligence Labs.

Rishabh Agarwal is a graduate from IIT Bombay, and holds a degree in Computer Science and Engineering. During his undergraduate course, he researched on “approximating the evaluation function in Scrabble”.

Agarwal went on to pursue his PhD in Artificial Intelligence at Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute in Canada.

He joined Saavn as a research intern working in the Search and Algorithms division, and then interned at Tower Research Capital’s Algorithm Trading team.

Agarwal joined Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist in June 2018 and stayed there till 2023. His research focused on deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL).

After this stint, the IIT Bombay graduate joined Google DeepMind. He worked there for two years on large language models (LLMs) using reinforcement learning (RL), self-improvement, and distillation.

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.