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Agarwal quits Meta’s million-dollar job in just five months?
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IIT-Bombay graduate and AI expert Rishabh Agarwal left Meta’s Superintelligence Lab after a brief stint, citing his desire to take new risks
AI researcher Rishabh Agarwal is in the spotlight after announcing his exit from Meta only five months into his high-paying role at the company’s Superintelligence Lab. Sharing the news on X (formerly Twitter), Agarwal 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 , reported timesofindia.indiatimes.com.”
He added that his choice was inspired by Mark Zuckerberg’s advice: “In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”
Who is Rishabh Agarwal?
Agarwal is an IIT-Bombay alumnus, holding an All India Rank of 33 in JEE. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering before pursuing a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, with his thesis focused on deep reinforcement learning.
He began his career as an intern at Saavn (now JioSaavn) in 2016, followed by a trading internship with Tower Research Capital in 2017. In 2018, he joined Latent Logic in the UK as a research intern, working on learning from demonstrations—a project later integrated into Waymo after its acquisition of Latent Logic.
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From 2018 to 2023, Agarwal worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist, making major contributions to reinforcement learning (RL)
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His research included co-authoring a NeurIPS 2021 Best Paper Award-winning study, advancing offline deep RL, and pushing the boundaries of efficiency in Atari performance benchmarks
In 2023, he transitioned to Google DeepMind, where he focused on reinforcement learning, self-improvement, and distillation techniques for large language models until early 2025.
In April 2025, Agarwal joined Meta’s Superintelligence Lab as a Research Scientist, working on RL scaling and reasoning in LLMs. His time there lasted until August 2025. Alongside his industry contributions, he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor at McGill University, a position he took up in 2024.
Agarwal’s journey reflects a career defined by bold decisions, groundbreaking research, and an openness to taking risks in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
