From Google Brain to his own startup: the AI career move everyone’s talking about

Before he became known for turning down a massive Meta job offer, Rishabh Agarwal had already built a résumé that reads like a tour of the world’s most elite AI labs: Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo, and Meta Superintelligence Labs.

Agarwal, an IIT Bombay graduate who scored AIR 33 in JEE, announced his decision to leave Meta last August, calling it a “tough decision” to take a different kind of risk by building something of his own. That decision recently resurfaced online in a viral post claiming he had rejected a $1 million offer from Mark Zuckerberg personally — a figure Agarwal has since corrected, clarifying that the real offer “was an order of magnitude higher than $1 million.”

According to the viral account, Agarwal was offered a package worth ₹9.5 crore per annum after five months at Meta before choosing to quit and co-found Periodic Labs, framing the decision as choosing to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond.

Periodic Labs, backed by Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, is building what the company describes as an AI scientist — a system capable of generating hypotheses for real-world experiments aimed at discovering new materials, medicines, and even new physics.