AI researcher Rishabh Agarwal has stepped down from his role at Meta after just five months despite holding a multi-million-dollar position. Taking to X(formerly Twitter) Rishabh Agarwal revealed 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.” Who is Rishabh Agarwal? What was his role at Meta’s Superintelligence Labs? But after 7.5 years across Google Brain DeepMind and Meta I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk he further wrote. Agarwal said that his move was inspired by a famous quote by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying In a world that’s changing so fast the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk Why did he decide to quit a ₹8.3 crore ( $1 million) job in just five months? In my short time at Meta we did push the frontier on post-training for thinking models. Specifically: - Pushing an 8B dense model to near Deepseek-R1 performance with RL scaling. - Using synthetic data mid-training to warm-start RL. - Developing better on-policy distillation methods reads his post. As per Agrawals LinkedIn profile he has completed Bachelors degree Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. He even qualified the JEE Main exam with All India Rank(AIR) 33. Rishabh Agarwal completed a PhD in Artificial Intelligence where his doctoral thesis focused on “Beyond the Status Quo in Deep Reinforcement Learning.” What were his key contributions at Google Brain and DeepMind? In May 2016 he completed an internship at Saavn (now JioSaavn) in Mumbai where he spent three months doing work on search and algorithms. The following year in summer 2017 Rishabh completed an internship at Tower Research Capital in Gurugram with an algorithmic trading team allowing him to experience quantitative finance and high-frequency trading systems early in his career. In 2018 he worked as a research intern at Waymo. From June 2018 to May 2023 Agarwal was a Senior Research Scientist at Google Brain working in deep reinforcement. He co-authored research that won the NeurIPS 2021 Best Paper Award for improving evaluation in RL. In May 2023 he worked as a staff research scientist at Google Deepmind. STORY HIGHLIGHTS Rishabh Agarwal has stepped down from his role at Meta after just five months. In April 2025 Agarwal joined Meta’s Superintelligence Labs as a Research Scientist In 2018 he worked as a research intern at Waymo. Agarwal was appointed Adjunct Professor at McGill University in September 2024 In April 2025 Agarwal joined Meta’s Superintelligence Labs as a Research Scientist where he focused on reinforcement learning (RL) scaling and distillation techniques to improve reasoning in large language models. He only stayed with Meta for five months (until August 2025). Simultaneously with his industry work Agarwal was appointed Adjunct Professor at McGill University in September 2024 which he holds alongside his research work.