Zuckerberg's Meta is already losing its highly paid AGI star hires

Mark Zuckerberg made headlines when he recruited overseers of major groups and veteran deputies, bringing them on as fresh appointees. However, within days of arriving at Meta, Shengjia Zhao, a co-creator of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has already threatened to resign and even signed documents to rejoin OpenAI even after being named Meta’s chief AI scientist. 

FT reports that recent recruits left soon after joining, including machine-learning scientist Ethan Knight, former OpenAI researcher Avi Verma and research scientist Rishabh Agarwal. Meta has also recently lost generative-AI leaders Chaya Nayak and Loredana Crisan, who spent nine and ten years at the company, respectively.

Earlier this year, Zuckerberg unveiled Meta’s Superintelligence Labs (MSL) as a moonshot meant to push the company to the front of the AI pack.

Meta offered huge pay packages with hundreds of millions, as reported by Cryptopolitan, and somewhere near $1 billion to hire researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Apple.

Only a few months in, the unit is dealing with turnover. Wired also reported that at least three researchers have left.

Meta scientist exits, quotes Zuckerberg on risk

Rishabh Agarwal, hired from Google DeepMind on a reported $1 million salary, joined Meta in April and said on August 25 that this would be his final week at the lab.

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. But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.…

— Rishabh Agarwal (@agarwl_) August 25, 2025

In a post on X, Agarwal said the choice was hard given the “talent and compute density” at MSL, but that he felt drawn to “a different kind of risk.” He also quoted Zuckerberg: “In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk.”

Reports pointed to restructurings, changing priorities and tight oversight at the highest level. The company recently divided its AI staff into four teams, creating more uncertainty inside MSL.

DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis told Lex Fridman that frontier researchers want to “help influence how AGI plays out and steward the technology safely into the world,” rather than chase salaries.

Anthropic cofounder Benjamin Mann put it bluntly that “My best case at Anthropic is we affect the future of humanity. My best case at Meta is we make money.”

OpenAI gains from Meta’s losses

OpenAI is benefiting from the departures. In addition to Verma and Knight, longtime Meta executive Chaya Nayak has joined OpenAI to work on special initiatives. OpenAI had criticized Meta’s recruiting style as “distasteful,” yet it is now taking in former Meta staff who say mission fit matters more than compensation.

Meta has invested heavily to narrow the gap with competitors in AGI, tapping former Scale AI chief Alexandr Wang and ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman for leadership posts. Even so, the latest resignations indicate that big pay packages alone may not build or keep a unified frontier-AI group.

For Zuckerberg, there is an irony in presenting himself as a bold risk-taker, as his hires now cite his own words as they exit. Whether Meta can stabilize its superintelligence push or keep shedding talent will set the tone for its next phase in the AI competition.

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