This AI researcher’s résumé went viral. His response to the hype is the real story
Rishabh Agarwal, who has worked at Google Brain, DeepMind and Meta, corrected the viral claim about his rejected job offer, revealing the real number was far higher than reported.
A viral post about an AI researcher’s résumé recently swept across social media, describing how Rishabh Agarwal walked away from a lucrative Meta job offer to build his own startup. What the post got wrong, according to Agarwal himself, was the number.
The viral claim stated that “Mark Zuckerberg personally gave him a $1 million job offer” which Agarwal denied. Responding to the resurfaced story, Agarwal clarified that the actual offer “was an order of magnitude higher than $1 million” — meaning he walked away from a package worth significantly more than the widely shared figure suggested.
Agarwal, an IIT Bombay graduate who scored AIR 33 in JEE, has built a career across some of the most prominent AI labs in the world, including Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo, and Meta Superintelligence Labs. According to the original viral post, he was offered a package worth ₹9.5 crore per annum after five months at Meta before deciding to quit and co-found Periodic Labs instead.
Agarwal announced his decision to leave Meta back in August, describing it as a “tough decision” to take a different kind of risk by building something of his own. Backed by Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, Periodic Labs is now working on an AI scientist capable of generating hypotheses for real-world experiments to discover new materials, medicines, and even new physics.
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