Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines co-founder who defected to OpenAI, is now at Google
In Brief
12:52 PM PDT · August 27, 2026
The game of musical chairs for AI executives continues. Barret Zoph, a co-founder of the AI startup Thinking Machines who left the company earlier this year to rejoin OpenAI, has found yet another job.
Zoph spent two years at OpenAI and left in October 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati, who had left the AI lab the month prior. In January, Zoph and another Thinking Machines co-founder, Luke Metz, quite dramatically departed from the startup to return to OpenAI.
His return didn’t quite stick. Zoph spent only five months at OpenAI, where he was tasked with heading AI enterprise sales. He left the company in June. And now we know where he landed.
Zoph has taken a position as vice president of research at Google (which happens to be another company where he previously worked). “We look forward to...
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