Overview

• Business Insider reports at least eight departures from MSL—spanning researchers, engineers, and a senior product leader—less than two months after the unit’s launch.
• WIRED confirms that Avi Verma and Ethan Knight left after brief stints to return to OpenAI, while Rishabh Agarwal exited roughly five months after joining.
• Meta said such changes are normal during an intense recruiting cycle, with a spokesperson calling the decisions routine.
• Other reported departures include veteran engineer Bert Maher to Anthropic and product leader Chaya Nayak to OpenAI, after a spree that recruited heavily from DeepMind and Scale AI and reshuffled internal teams.
• Agarwal said he worked on post‑training for “thinking” models including RL scaling and on‑policy distillation; Business Insider reports he is set to join Periodic Labs.