Barret Zoph returns to Google as VP of research after quitting his own $50B startup
What's the deal? Barret ZophDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → is joining AlphabetDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →'s GoogleDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → as vice president of research, returning to the organisation he left in 2022. He arrives after a short stint at OpenAI and a spell co-founding Thinking Machines Lab in early 2025, and will bring his reinforcement learning and post-training expertise to Google's Gemini models.
Why now? The hire lands during a visible reshuffle at Google's AI operation. Chief executive Demis Hassabis stepped aside last month to become chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, and some DeepMind teams have been folded back into corporate Google.
The route back: Zoph worked as a research scientist at Google from 2016 to 2022, left for OpenAI where he ran post-training, then departed with Mira Murati to co-found Thinking Machines Lab in early 2025. Murati fired him in January, citing a history of "performance, conduct and trust issues," a version Zoph disputes. He briefly returned to OpenAI before this move.
What could go wrong? Neither Zoph nor Google has said much about his remit. And his recent track record is short: he gave Thinking Machines roughly a year, raising the question of how long he stays this time.
What's the endgame? Google is trying to catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI in AI that writes code — to date the most lucrative use of the technology. At OpenAI, Zoph was charged with getting businesses to use its Codex coding product.
The bleak, not the hire: Thinking Machines has thinned considerably. Roughly a third of its founding team has left, and the departures came while the company raised at valuations climbing from $12bn towards a reported $50bn. Companies raising at those multiples rarely shed founders.
The signal: The frontier labs are largely staffed by the same few hundred researchers passing between them, so every hire is visibly somebody else's loss. Google itself lost Jeff Dean and three senior researchers this month, plus Noam Shazeer and Nobel laureate John Jumper earlier in the year. Zoph's return suggests the traffic no longer runs only one way.
Read more: thenextweb.com, The Wall Street Journal
Image credit: Kevin Krejci
