Barret Zoph, fired from Thinking Machines, lands at Google

The game of musical chairs for AI executives continues. Barret Zoph, a co-founder of AI startup Thinking Machines who left the company earlier this year to rejoin OpenAI, has found another job.

Zoph spent two years at OpenAI before leaving 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, dramatically departed the startup to return to OpenAI; it was later revealed that Zoph had been fired.

His return to OpenAI didn’t stick either. Zoph spent only five months there, tasked with heading AI enterprise sales, before leaving the company in June. He has now taken a position as vice president of research at Google, a company where he previously worked. “We look forward to Barret returning to Google and bringing his RL and post-training expertise to Gemini,” a Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

The reasons behind such short tenures for AI executives aren’t always clear, but turnover across the industry has been high — and especially so at OpenAI, which has lost a significant amount of critical staff over the past eight months despite readying for an IPO and remaining one of the most powerful players in tech. The departures of its chief operating officer and, more recently, one of its top data-center executives have added to the pattern.

Why it matters

Zoph’s path — fired from a startup he co-founded, a five-month second stint at OpenAI, now a research VP role at Google — is a fast-moving case study in how thin the loyalty layer has become among frontier-lab researchers, whose scarce post-training and reinforcement-learning expertise gives them leverage to move even after a public ousting.