Thinking Machines Lab Co-Founder Barret Zoph Joins Google

Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Lab co-founder who abruptly defected to OpenAI this year amid a dispute with Chief Executive Mira Murati, has changed employers again.

Zoph, who served as chief technology officer at the startup and led a push to sell artificial-intelligence products to businesses at OpenAI, is joining Alphabet’s GOOGL -1.43%decrease; down pointing triangle Google as a vice president of research, the company said.

“We look forward to Barret returning to Google and bringing his RL and post-training expertise to Gemini,” Google spokesman Thomas Schoenfelder said in a statement, referring to reinforcement learning, an AI-training technique.

Zoph left Thinking Machines in January, along with fellow co-founder Luke Metz and a third employee, Sam Schoenholz. All three joined OpenAI, where they had worked before leaving to join the new startup, which aims to make AI systems that work with humans rather than operate autonomously.

Metz has also since left OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter. He is joining Meta, according to one of the people.

Zoph’s arrival at Google comes as the company has been restructuring its AI development efforts, and follows a string of departures by high-profile AI researchers. Its chief, Demis Hassabis, stepped aside last month to become chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Earlier this month, Jeff Dean, one of Google’s longest tenured and most prominent employees, left with three other senior researchers to found an AI startup. In June, Character.AI co-founder Noam Shazeer left Google for OpenAI, and John Jumper, who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on protein folding, left for Anthropic.

Google is seeking to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI in developing AI that can create code, to date the most lucrative application for the technology and one seen as key to accelerating development of more-advanced models. In his recent role at OpenAI, Zoph was charged with getting businesses to use the company’s Codex coding product.

During his first tenure at OpenAI, before he joined Thinking Machines, Zoph also ran post-training. After he and Murati co-founded the startup in early 2025, along with four other co-founders, it drew heavily from the post-training team for its initial hires.

A year later, Murati fired Zoph and told employees that he had a history of performance, conduct and trust issues. During his tenure at the company, Zoph had an undisclosed relationship with an employee and was subsequently given reduced responsibilities, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Zoph told the Journal that Murati fired him only after he had notified her of his intention to leave for a new job and said the reduction in his responsibilities was temporary. Before his firing, Zoph, Metz and Schoenholz confronted Murati and asked for Zoph to be given charge of all technical decision-making, the Journal reported.

Zoph worked as a research scientist at Google from 2016 through 2022 before joining OpenAI.