IIT Bombay alumnus quits ₹8 crore salary job
Quitting a million-dollar job isn’t something you hear every day. Yet, that’s exactly what Rishabh Agarwal, one of India’s brightest tech minds has done. The IIT Bombay alumnus and AI researcher shocked the tech world by resigning from Meta’s prestigious Superintelligence Lab just five months after joining, despite an eye-popping salary reportedly worth ₹8 crore a year.
IIT Bombay alumnus quits ₹8 crore salary job
Agarwal announced his decision on X (formerly Twitter), revealing that this is his last week at Meta. Calling it a “tough decision,” he said leaving the Superintelligence TBD team wasn’t easy, especially given the “talent and compute density” at the company. But after spending over seven years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, Agarwal said he felt an irresistible pull to “take on a different kind of risk.”
IIT Bombay alumnus quits ₹8 crore salary job
Interestingly, he credits Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself for inspiring the move, quoting Zuck’s famous mantra: “In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”
Major Contributions in Just 5 Months
Despite his short stint, Agarwal made remarkable contributions to Meta’s cutting-edge AI projects. He revealed that he:
- Pushed an 8-bit dense model close to DeepSeek R1-level performance through RL scaling.
- Leveraged synthetic data mid-training to warm-start reinforcement learning.
- Worked on innovative on-policy distillation methods to improve model efficiency.
Meta has been aggressively building its superintelligence team under Zuckerberg’s leadership, offering multi-million-dollar packages to lure the best minds in AI and Agarwal was one of their top recruits.
IIT Bombay alumnus quits ₹8 crore salary job
From IIT Bombay to the World’s Top AI Labs
Rishabh Agarwal’s journey is nothing short of extraordinary. With an AIR 33 in JEE, he earned his computer science degree from IIT Bombay before pursuing a Ph.D. at Mila-Quebec AI Institute. His career includes stints at Tower Research Capital, Saavn, and Waymo before moving into full-time roles at Google Brain, DeepMind, and eventually Meta.
IIT Bombay alumnus quits ₹8 crore salary job
His decision to leave Meta has sparked curiosity about what “different kind of risk” he plans to pursue next a startup? An independent AI venture? Or something entirely unexpected?
Whatever his next move, one thing is certain: Rishabh Agarwal’s story proves that sometimes, the boldest career decisions aren’t about the paycheck they’re about the challenge.
