Barret Zoph lands at Google DeepMind

Barret Zoph has joined Google DeepMind as vice president of research, working on reinforcement learning and post-training, a role at a company where he previously worked before co-founding Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati in 2024. Zoph left OpenAI that October to start Thinking Machines as its CTO, then dramatically returned to OpenAI in January with fellow co-founder Luke Metz. It later emerged he had been pushed out of Thinking Machines rather than leaving voluntarily. He lasted five months at OpenAI, heading AI enterprise sales, before departing in June.

What it means for you

Zoph’s route through four employers in under two years, at three of the most prominent AI labs, says less about him personally and more about the state of the market for elite research and research-leadership talent: it is thin, expensive, and highly mobile, even after very public exits, the same dynamic behind OpenAI’s own run of senior departures this year. If you’re trying to hire or retain senior AI researchers, expect compensation and equity offers at this tier to keep escalating, and build succession plans that assume even senior hires may not stay put for long, regardless of how the hire was announced.