A former OpenAI and Thinking Machines co-founder is joining Google DeepMind as a research VP

Barret Zoph is joining Alphabet $GOOGL's Google as a vice president of research, the company said Wednesday, marking his return to the company where he worked as a research scientist from 2016 to 2022, according to the Wall Street Journal.

"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 co-founded Thinking Machines Lab in early 2025 alongside Mira Murati and four others, but left the startup in January after a dispute with Murati, who serves as chief executive. Murati fired Zoph and informed staff that he had demonstrated a pattern of performance, conduct, and trust problems, the Journal reported. While at Thinking Machines, Zoph carried on an undisclosed relationship with a colleague, and his responsibilities were later scaled back as a result.

According to Zoph, Murati dismissed him only after he had already told her he planned to leave for another position, and he characterized the scaling back of his duties as a temporary measure.

After departing Thinking Machines, Zoph joined OpenAI — where he had previously run post-training — and took on a role focused on getting businesses to use the company's Codex coding product. Fellow Thinking Machines co-founder Luke Metz also left OpenAI and is joining Meta $META.

Zoph's arrival comes as Google has been working to shore up its AI research ranks following a series of high-profile departures. Noam Shazeer, who co-led Google's Gemini models, departed for OpenAI in June, and Nobel Prize-winning researcher John Jumper left Google DeepMind for Anthropic around the same time — moves that sent Alphabet stock tumbling as much as 7% in a single session. Earlier this month, Jeff Dean, one of Google's longest-tenured researchers, left after 27 years to co-found an AI startup focused on automating scientific research, alongside three other senior colleagues.

Google is also navigating leadership changes at the top of its AI unit. Demis Hassabis stepped down last month as chief executive of Google DeepMind to become the unit's chairman and chief scientist of Alphabet, while Koray Kavukcuoglu was elevated to a senior vice president role overseeing Gemini model development.

Google wants to close the gap with Anthropic and OpenAI on AI coding capabilities, an area the company considers central to driving progress toward more sophisticated models.