Thinking Machines Lab co-founder returns to Google after OpenAI detour

Barret Zoph is back to where he started after the Thinking Machines Lab co-founder announced on X that he had returned to Google DeepMind. Zoph’s return came after a six-year detour punctuated by two stints at OpenAI and starting an AI lab with Mira Murati, who briefly replaced Sam Altman at OpenAI in 2024. 

Zoph expressed his excitement to be “joining Google DeepMind!” as vice president of research. The new Google DeepMind executive also expressed his optimism about being part of the lab’s reinforcement learning and post-training work. 

The outside perception is not as positive, though, with the AI lab appearing to be in the middle of a serious reshuffle, mostly exits, at the top.

Where has Zoph worked? 

Zoph first appeared on the map when he joined the Google Brain Residency program. After about six years as a Google Brain research scientist, Zoph jumped ship to OpenAI, where he rose to occupy the vice president of research office. 

DeepMind absorbed Google Brain in 2023.

After a dramatic year at OpenAI, Zoph left to co-found Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati in late 2024. He also doubled as chief technology officer at that stop.

The Thinking Machines Lab episode ended acrimoniously in January 2026 after allegations of misconduct emerged regarding a relationship with a colleague that was never disclosed. 

That same month, Zoph was back at OpenAI, arriving with Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz to lead the company’s enterprise push. That stint ended in June, lasting only five months. 

Zoph’s research expertise is in foundational work areas like neural architecture search and large-scale model training. It is not the product layer that has driven the AI talent wars.

Google DeepMind fights to maintain AI relevance

Zoph arrives at Google DeepMind at a time when the lab is looking to reorient its goals around its Gemini model. That push has stalled over leadership setbacks in recent weeks. 

Just three weeks ago, Demis Hassabis stepped back from his day-to-day DeepMind role to become chairman and Alphabet’s chief scientist in early August. CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu stepped up to fill the operational void Hassabis left. 

Chief scientist Jeff Dean and senior staff members like Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le left to start their own startup called Discovery Loop.

Google’s corporate arm has also absorbed DeepMind teams, according to Fortune. 

Zoph’s arrival cuts against a run of bad numbers for DeepMind. Data from UK intelligence firm Zeki, shared with Fortune, shows the lab’s ratio of research and engineering hires to departures fell from roughly 12-to-1 in the second quarter of 2023 to about 2-to-1 in the third quarter of 2026. 

Of DeepMind staff who left in the past year, Zeki found that 25% went to Anthropic, 21% to Meta and 14% to OpenAI. Its share of such hires across Europe, the Middle East and Africa dropped from 49% in 2022 to 2023 to 18.6% in 2025 to 2026.

If you're reading this, you’re already ahead. Stay there with our newsletter.