Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines co-founder ousted before joining OpenAI, is now at Google
- ID
- 18743
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 28 Aug 2026, 3:52 AM
- Fetched
- 28 Aug 2026, 6:08 AM
- Provider
- TechCrunch
- Category
- technology
- Original URL
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/27/barret-zoph-the-thinking-machines-co-founder-who-defected-to-openai-is-now-at-google/
- Source URL
- https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Summary
- Score
- 3.0
- Created
- 28 Aug 2026, 6:09 AM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersai_ml_learners
What happened
Barret Zoph, a co-founder of Thinking Machines who left in January to rejoin OpenAI, has now joined Google as VP of research focused on RL and post-training for Gemini. He lasted only five months at OpenAI, where he headed AI enterprise sales before leaving in June. The move highlights continued high executive turnover in the AI industry, particularly at OpenAI.
Why it matters
For builders, this is mostly signal about talent concentration and instability at top AI labs rather than something actionable. The one concrete detail worth noting is Google's explicit intent to apply Zoph's RL and post-training expertise to Gemini, which suggests Gemini's post-training pipeline may shift—relevant if you are evaluating or building on Gemini APIs.
Discussion angle
Whether executive churn at OpenAI and the reshuffling of RL/post-training talent across Google, OpenAI, and Thinking Machines tells us anything useful about which model providers will have the strongest post-training capabilities in the next 6-12 months.