Who is Rishabh Agarwal, Indian-origin AI researcher who left million-dollar job at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta after just five months

AI researcher

Rishabh Agarwal

is making headlines after he quit his multi-million dollar job at

Meta

in just 5 months. Sharing a post on microblogging site 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.” He continued “But after 7.5 years across

Google Brain

, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.” In the post, he said that by quitting his job, he chose to follow Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's own advice: “In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk”.

Who is Rishabh Agarwal

According to his LinkedIn profile, Rishabh Agarwal is an

IIT-Bombay

graduate. With a JEE All India Rank of 33, he completed his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay. He holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence with the Thesis: Beyond the status quo in deep reinforcement learning. Agarwal started his career in May 2016 as an intern at Saavn (now JioSaavn) in Mumbai, where he worked on search and algorithms for three months. The following summer, in 2017, he interned with Tower Research Capital in Gurugram as part of the algorithmic trading team.

In early 2018, Agarwal joined Latent Logic in the Greater Oxford Area as a research intern, focusing on learning from demonstrations. His work there later became part of Waymo, which acquired Latent Logic in December 2019.From June 2018 to May 2023, Agarwal worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist, where he focused on deep reinforcement learning. During this period, he co-authored research that won the NeurIPS 2021 Best Paper Award on better evaluation in RL, helped popularize offline deep RL through influential papers such as An Optimistic Perspective on Offline RL and RL Unplugged, and contributed to achieving human-level performance on Atari with human-level efficiency.In May 2023, Agarwal moved to Google DeepMind as a Staff Research Scientist. Over two years, until April 2025, he worked on reinforcement learning, self-improvement, and distillation techniques for large language models (LLMs).In April 2025, he joined Meta

Superintelligence Labs

as a Research Scientist, focusing on RL scaling and distillation for LLM reasoning. His stint there lasted five months until August 2025.Alongside his industry roles, Agarwal was appointed Adjunct Professor at McGill University in September 2024, a role he continues to hold.