Meta AI hit by talent exodus? Rishabh Agarwal, Avi Verma, Ethan Knight quit within months of joining

At least three employees hired for tech giant Meta's Superintelligence Labs (MSL) have left the company less than a month of being hired for extravagant pay packages in Mark Zuckerberg's artificial intelligence (AI) hiring blitz.

According to a report by Wired, Rishabh Agarwal, Avi Verma and Ethan Knight have all left Meta, with the latter two headed back to Sam Altman-led OpenAI.

Agarwal announced his decision in an elaborate post on social media platform X, calling it a “tough decision”, but that he “felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.”

Meta spokesperson Dave Arnold told the publication that the moves are “normal”, saying, “During an intense recruiting process, some people will decide to stay in their current job rather than starting a new one.”

Meta puts hiring freeze for AI roles

Notably, the Wall Street Journal on August 20 reported have stated that Meta has put a hiring freeze for its AI division. “All that's happening here is some basic organizational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises,” a spokesperson for Meta told Reuters about the hiring freeze.

But prior to this, the MSL team has onboarded 50 staff, including poached employees from Apple, Anthropic, xAI, Google, and OpenAI for packages up to $100 million.

Sam Altman on Meta's poaching: ‘Distasteful’

At the time of the poaching, reports cited Sam Altman's internal memo to staff which called Meta's moves “distasteful”, adding, “I’ve lost track of how many people from here they’ve tried to get to be their Chief Scientist.”

Earlier, in an interview with The Information, Mark Zuckerberg called reports on Meta's million dollar pay packages to poach AI staff from competitors “inaccurate”, but did not elaborate on the actual numbers .

Speaking to the publication on reports of “$100-200 million” pay packages for the MSL team, Mark Zuckerberg called it a “hot market” adding that it makes “sense” to spend big on gaining the right talent.

Explaining the decision to offer lucrative pay packages to AI recuits, the tech billionaire also noted that AI does not need a “massive team”, stating, “You actually kind of want the smallest group of people who can fit the whole thing in their head. So there's just an absolute premium for the best and most talented people.”

“So it kind of makes sense when you kind of think about it that, from that perspective, the amount that is being spent to recruit the people is actually still quite small compared to the overall investment and all when you talk about super intelligence,” he added.