Zoph has announced his decision of joining Google by posting on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter).
Barret Zoph, the co-founder of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab has joined Google as the vice president of research, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. Zoph’s move comes after a turbulent year in which he left Thinking Machines following a dispute with CEO Mira Murati, then departed OpenAI less than six months later. “Excited to announce I am joining Google DeepMind! I started my AI career in the Google Brain Residency class and am excited to rejoin. I am going to be working on RL and Post-Training – excited to announce more soon. Google has all the ingredients to continue to be incredibly successful in the AI space and am excited to be part of that mission,” wrote Zoph.
Metz has also since left OpenAI and is reportedly joining Meta, according to people familiar with the matter — meaning two of the three defectors who returned to OpenAI together in January have already moved on again. The dispute reportedly escalated before Zoph’s firing, when he, Metz, and Schoenholz confronted Murati and requested that Zoph be given authority over all of the company’s technical decision-making, according to the Journal. Zoph’s move to Google comes less than six months after he rejoined OpenAI. He left Thinking Machines in January alongside fellow co-founder Luke Metz and a third employee, Sam Schoenholz — all three returning to OpenAI, where they had worked before departing to help launch Thinking Machines, a startup built around the goal of creating AI systems designed to work alongside humans rather than operate fully autonomously. Zoph’s hire lands amid a period of significant restructuring within Google’s AI organization, along with a string of high-profile departures. Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis stepped aside from his prior role last month to become chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. In June, Character.AI co-founder Noam Shazeer departed Google for OpenAI, while John Jumper, who shared a Nobel Prize for his work on protein folding, left Google for Anthropic.
Earlier this month, longtime Google veteran Jeff Dean left the company along with three other senior researchers to launch a new AI startup.