Periodic Labs is building an ‘AI scientist.’ Its co-founder just corrected the internet on his old salary

Periodic Labs, the AI startup backed by Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, is building what it calls an AI scientist — a system designed to generate hypotheses for real-world experiments that could help discover new materials, medicines, and even new physics. Its co-founder, Rishabh Agarwal, recently found himself correcting the internet’s version of how he ended up there.

A viral post claimed Agarwal, an IIT Bombay graduate who scored AIR 33 in JEE and previously worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo, and Meta Superintelligence Labs, had turned down a $1 million job offer personally extended by Mark Zuckerberg. Agarwal has since clarified that the real figure “was an order of magnitude higher than $1 million” — meaning the true offer was substantially larger than reported.

The original post had described the offer as worth roughly ₹9.5 crore per annum, extended after five months at Meta, before Agarwal chose to quit and co-found Periodic Labs instead, framing the move as choosing to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond.

Agarwal announced his departure from Meta last August, describing it as a “tough decision” to take a different kind of risk by building something of his own — a decision that has now drawn renewed attention as his resume, and the scale of what he gave up, continues to circulate online.