Meta has been, of late, going all in on its hiring efforts for its superintelligence labs. The company has reportedly offered pay packages as high as $100 million, and poached employees from companies like OpenAI. However, not all has been going well with these efforts. A few employees have already left the company, citing various reasons.
Among these employees is Rishabh Agarwal, who joined the company at a whopping $1 million salary five months ago. Agarwal said via X, “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 added the original pitch from Mark Zuckerberg and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang to build in Meta’s Superintelligence team was compelling, but he chose to follow Zuckerberg’s own advice: “In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”
READ: Rishabh Agarwal quits Meta after five months (
Three other researchers left the lab in recent weeks, with two of them returning to OpenAI. Among them are Avi Verma, and Ethan Knight, who have both previously worked for OpenAI. Ethan Knight had also worked at Elon Musk’s xAI following his stint in OpenAI.
Chaya Nayak, a long-time Meta executive, has also announced her exit from the company following a decade-long stint. “I remember my first weeks at Facebook like they were yesterday. I joined to help jumpstart Data for Good, an effort to show how data and AI/ML could benefit the world. What started as a bold experiment grew into the foundation of my career,” she shared as she announced her departure.
During her time at Meta, Nayak led critical projects, from Disaster Maps supporting communities in crisis to leading the Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) team, which focused on responsible data practices. She also played a key role in global responses during the U.S. 2020 elections and more recently, led efforts in generative AI, contributing to the development of three generations of Llama and Meta AI. “In the last 2.5 years, I worked on GenAI – building three generations of Llama and Meta AI, solving hard problems at incredible speed, and imagining what the next wave of AI could mean for society,” she wrote.
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Nayak said that she too will be joining OpenAI. “Today, I’m joining OpenAI to work with Irina Kofman on Special Initiatives – exploring new opportunities at the frontier of AI. It feels like the perfect next chapter: to take everything I’ve learned, and pour it into work that will help define what comes next for technology and society,” she said, adding, “The journey isn’t over. I’m just turning the page.”
Meta also recently froze hiring after its hiring spree, according to a Wall Street Journal report. A Meta spokesperson described this as “basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”