After Rishabh Agarwal, another AI researcher at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), Avi Verma, has left the company. Before being hired by Mark Zuckerberg, he worked at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Elon Musk’s Tesla. Now, he is returning to Sam Altman’s company, Wired reported.
Who is Avi Verma?
Verma is an AI researcher. According to his LinkedIn profile, he holds a Bachelor of Science (BS) degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. He was also a research intern at the university.
He joined OpenAI in June last year, before taking up Mark Zuckerberg’s lucrative offer for AI at Meta. He has reportedly returned to OpenAI.
Before this, he worked at Elon Musk’s Tesla for close to four years. There, he started as an intern in October 2020 and quit as a Senior Machine Learning Engineer.
Mark Zuckerberg’s new-found interest
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta “poached” AI researchers and engineers from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and more by offering them as high as nine-figure packages and luring them with reverse acquisition techniques.
Zuckerberg reportedly got interested in hiring AI talent after the Llama model was released. He personally reached out to top researchers and engineers via email and WhatsApp. In some cases, he even met people who had initially turned down his offer and convinced them to join.
At the time, in an internal memo to staff, Sam Altman termed the “poaching” by Meta as “distasteful”. The memo said, “I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get to be their Chief Scientist.”
Before hitting pause on hiring at Meta for AI roles, the company hired 50 people. Of these, it hired at least 13 people from Google, three from Apple, three from xAI, and two from Anthropic for a total of 50-plus new employees and offered them $100 million packages.
Three AI researchers left Meta
Wired reported that two staffers have returned to OpenAI after less than a month since they were hired at Meta.
Ethan Knight, who interned at OpenAI, joined Meta after his stint at Elon Musk’s xAI, is also returning to Sam Altman’s company, Wired reported.
Rishabh Agarwal, too, left Meta and announced his decision on X. “It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density,” he wrote on X, before adding, “But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.”
The outlet further reported that Chaya Nayak, director of generative AI product management at Meta, is also moving to OpenAI.
Meta says it’s ‘normal’
“During an intense recruiting process, some people will decide to stay in their current job rather than starting a new one,” said Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold.
The spokesperson added, “That’s normal.”
