Indian techie Rishabh Aggarwal is a well-known name in the AI field, as the IIT Bombay graduate is building an AI startup, Periodic Labs. Last year, around August, Agarwal announced his “difficult decision” to exit Meta and take a different kind of risk by creating something of his own. As Agarwal’s impressive CV began to go viral again, Agarwal addressed claims that he had passed up a $1 million offer from Meta and clarified that the offer was “orders of magnitude higher than $1 million”, suggesting that he spent just over $1 million to build his own company.“Meet Rishabh Agarwal, who scored AIR 33 in JEE and completed B.Tech, Computer Science from IIT Bombay. He worked at Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo and when Mark Zuckerberg personally offered him a $1 million job, he rejected it. And do you know what he is doing today? Building a next generation AI company called Periodic Labs,” the viral post said.“And do you know what he’s doing today? Building a next-generation AI company called Periodic Labs.”“Many of us may not know him well, but in the world of AI, he is a huge celebrity. That’s because he has worked in some of the most elite AI labs on the planet: Google Brain, DeepMind, Waymo, and Meta Superintelligence Labs.“Despite this, when he was offered a job at ₹9.5 crore per annum after five months at Meta, he rejected it, left the job and joined Periodic Labs as a co-founder,” the post said. Aggarwal chose to be a big fish in a small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond, the post said.Backed by Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, Agarwal’s Periodic Labs is building the future of next-generation AI as it builds an AI scientist who can generate hypotheses for real-world experiments to discover new materials, drugs, and even new physics.