At least three artificial intelligence researchers have resigned from Meta’s new superintelligence lab, just two months after CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the initiative. Two of the staffers have returned to OpenAI, where they both previously worked, after less than one-month stints at Meta, WIRED has confirmed.
Avi Verma was previously a researcher at OpenAI. Ethan Knight worked at the ChatGPT maker earlier in his career but joined Meta from Elon Musk’s xAI. A third researcher, Rishabh Agarwal, announced publicly on Monday he was leaving Meta’s lab as well. He joined the tech giant in April to work on generative AI projects before switching to a role at Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), according to his LinkedIn profile. While the reasons for Agarwal’s departure are not known, he is based in Canada and Meta’s AI teams are predominantly based in Menlo Park, California.
“It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density,” Agarwal wrote on X, referring to the team at MSL that is specifically pursuing frontier AI research. “But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.” It’s unclear where he may be going next. Agarwal did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
“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. “That’s normal,”
Meta is also losing another leader who has worked at the tech giant for nearly a decade. Chaya Nayak, the director of generative AI product management at Meta, is joining OpenAI to work on special initiatives, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the hire.
Verma and Knight did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Nayak declined to comment in time for publication.
The departures are the strongest public signal yet that Meta Superintelligence Labs could be off to a rocky start. Zuckerberg lured people to join the lab with nine-figure pay packages associated more often with professional sports stars than tech workers, hoping the influx of talent would allow the social networking giant to rapidly catch up with its competitors in the race toward so-called artificial general intelligence.
But Meta executives have reportedly struggled to combat bureaucratic and recruitment issues related to its AI initiatives. Meta has repeatedly reorganized its AI teams in recent months, most recently splitting employees into four groups, per The Wall Street Journal.
In July, Zuckerberg announced that another former OpenAI researcher, Shengjia Zhao, who played a key role in the creation of ChatGPT, would become the chief scientist of MSL. The announcement came after Zhao tried to return to OpenAI—even going so far as to sign employment paperwork—according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the events.
“Shengjia cofounded MSL and has been our scientific lead since day one,” Arnold said in a statement to WIRED. “We formalized his role once our recruiting had ramped and the team had taken shape.”
