Barret Zoph Lands at Google DeepMind as VP of Research After a Five-Month OpenAI Stint That Ended in Firing

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Zoph, who co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati and served as its CTO, left the startup in January 2026 with co-founder Luke Metz to return to OpenAI, where he was put on enterprise AI sales and was later revealed to have been fired after five months. TechCrunch reported August 27 that he has now taken a vice president of research role at Google, a company he worked at before OpenAI. The loop, Google to OpenAI to Thinking Machines to OpenAI to Google, is a compact map of how little durable lock-in the frontier labs have on senior research talent.