Barret Zoph Returns to Google DeepMind to Lead Gemini Research

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