Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines co-founder ousted before joining OpenAI, is now at Google
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Barret Zoph, a co-founder of Thinking Machines, has joined Google as vice president of research. Zoph previously worked at Google before spending two years at OpenAI, which he left in October 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati. In January, he and co-founder Luke Metz left Thinking Machines to return to OpenAI, though it was later reported that Zoph had been fired from the startup. Zoph spent only five months back at OpenAI, leading AI enterprise sales, before leaving in June. Google said he would bring his reinforcement learning and post-training expertise to its Gemini efforts. His moves reflect the high executive turnover across the AI industry, particularly at OpenAI.
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