India, Sept. 4 -- Meta's million-dollar pay package hirings are already walking out the door. Mark Zuckerberg's grand vision for building the greatest artificial general intelligence (AGI) the world has ever seen has hit a jarring reality check-and this has happened within one summer. The turbulence all around is difficult to miss.

Meta's much-hyped Superintelligence Lab, which reportedly dangled many a million-dollar pay package carrot to attract talent (and they did, through the summer), cannot be assessed without the context of those collective millions being spent in quick time. But that isn't the only angle.

What caught my eye was something Rishabh Agarwal wrote in a post on X: "But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, an...