A couple of months ago, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg made headlines when he sought out to create a team of superintelligent AI coders and researchers who could put Meta AI at the forefront of the generative AI race. Called the Meta Superintelligence Lab, Zuckerberg pitched to the most brilliant minds in the industry with multi-million salary packages, and a lot of them came in from places like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and more.
However, it seems the bubble has busted. Within a few months, Meta’s prized engineers are already quitting Zuckerberg’s superintelligent lab.
Recently, in a series of high-profile departures, two top researchers, Rishabh Agarwal and Avi Verma, have resigned from Zuckerberg’s superintelligence team at Meta. The resignations occurred within months of their recruitment, thus questioning Meta’s ability to retain its most valuable minds.
Rishabh Agarwal left Meta AI in just five months
About Rishabh Agarwal
Agarwal’s departure, which happened after just five months, was particularly surprising given his seven-figure salary. In a social media post, Agarwal stated, “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.”
“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”,” he said.
The IIT Bombay alumnus, who had earned a doctorate in computer science from the Mila– Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, hasn’t revealed his next job. Agarwal started his career with internships at Saavn, Tower Research Capital, and Waymo before joining Google Brain in 2018 as a Senior Research Scientist. He was later transferred to Google DeepMind for focusing on advancing large language models.
Avi Verma went back to OpenAI
About Avi Verma
Following in the footsteps Agarwal, Avi Verma, who was another sought-after AI researcher at Meta, also resigned from the Superintelligence Labs (MSL) to rejoin OpenAI. Unlike Agarwal, Verma’s departure wasn’t due to personal reasons. Instead, Verma was lured away by OpenAI with a multi-million dollar compensation package as part of a reverse acquisition tactic. Verma’s decision to return to his old company, along with another researcher named Ethan Knight, highlights the challenge Meta faces in integrating top talent into its new AI programs.
Verma, who holds a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, is now back at OpenAI. Prior to the rapid switchover, he worked at Tesla for four years after sarting his stint at the Elon Musk form in Octiber 2020. He quit Tesla as a Senion Machine Learning Engineer.
