Barret Zoph is joining Google as vice president of research, the company confirmed, putting his reinforcement learning and post-training background to work on Gemini. The hire was disclosed to the Wall Street Journal.
Thinking Machines came together in late 2024. Mira Murati had just left OpenAI, and Zoph signed on as a co-founder. The startup’s life was brief: Zoph and Luke Metz were gone by January. What looked like a return to OpenAI was actually a firing, a detail that surfaced later. Zoph’s second chapter at the lab lasted five months, split between AI enterprise sales duties and an exit in June.
Google is familiar territory for Zoph, who worked there before his first OpenAI tenure. Post-training and reinforcement learning, his specialties, are exactly the areas Google is pushing hardest with Gemini.
The hire lands in a bruising season for OpenAI, which has lost its COO and its top data center executive in eight months while preparing to go public. Across the industry, senior AI talent keeps spinning through the revolving door.
