Barret Zoph Joins Google DeepMind After 20-Month Circuit Through Thinking Machines Lab and OpenAI

Barret Zoph, co-founder of Mira Murati's $12 billion Thinking Machines Lab, has joined Google DeepMind as VP of Research, applying his reinforcement learning and post-training expertise to Gemini. His path — Google to OpenAI to Thinking Machines Lab, back to OpenAI, then Google again in under two years — tracks the persistent talent circulation among frontier AI labs.