Barret Zoph takes Google research VP role after five-month OpenAI stint

Zoph returns to Google as research VP

Barret Zoph, a co-founder of the AI startup Thinking Machines whose second stint at OpenAI lasted just five months, has joined Google as vice president of research, according to TechCrunch. Google confirmed the appointment to the Wall Street Journal, saying it looks forward to his return — Google is another of his former employers — and to applying his reinforcement learning and post-training expertise to Gemini.

The announcement caps a turbulent stretch in which Zoph has cycled through three organizations since late 2024.

A compressed timeline

Per TechCrunch's account, Zoph spent two years at OpenAI before leaving in October 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati, who had exited OpenAI a month earlier. That chapter closed in January, when Zoph and fellow co-founder Luke Metz returned to OpenAI in a departure TechCrunch describes as dramatic. It later emerged that Zoph had actually been fired from the startup rather than leaving on his own terms.

The homecoming did not stick. Zoph was given responsibility for AI enterprise sales at OpenAI but stayed only five months, leaving in June. His new Google position makes it three organizational homes since the start of the year.

OpenAI's churn problem

TechCrunch frames the hire against a backdrop of unusually high turnover across the AI industry, with OpenAI hit especially hard. The lab, which by TechCrunch's account is readying itself for an IPO and remains one of the most powerful presences in tech, has lost a number of critical staff members over the past eight months. Departures have ranged from its chief operating officer to one of its top data center executives, exits that have left onlookers puzzled, the outlet reports.

Why it matters

Zoph brings hands-on experience in reinforcement learning and post-training — the techniques used to sharpen models after their initial training run — and Google has pointedly directed that expertise at Gemini as the model family competes with rivals such as OpenAI's. The hire also illustrates just how mobile senior AI talent has become: researchers at the top of the field now cycle between established labs and well-funded startups in stints sometimes measured in months, and employers are proving willing to bring back people who walked away. For OpenAI, watching a high-profile returnee leave again after five months — set against the wider executive churn TechCrunch documents — adds to questions about retention at a delicate moment for the company. And for Thinking Machines, the episode is a reminder that founding teams at buzzy AI startups can come apart quickly, and that the real story behind a departure, in this case a dismissal, may only surface later.