Barret Zoph Joins Google: Surprising End to a Risky Year
Barret Zoph Joins Google: Surprising End to a Risky Year
摘要: Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Co-Founder Ousted Before Joining OpenAI, Is Now at Google
August 28, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
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Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines Co-Founder Ousted Before Joining OpenAI, Is Now at Google
August 28, 2026
Artificial Intelligence
Comment off
Barret Zoph has joined Google DeepMind as vice president of research, and the announcement closes one of the strangest twenty-two months anybody has had in a field that already specialises in strange career moves. He announced it himself on X on 26 August 2026, and TechCrunch confirmed the move the following day.
The short version reads like a rumour. He left OpenAI in autumn 2024 to co-found a startup with Mira Murati. He was fired from that startup in January 2026. He went straight back to OpenAI, lasted five months in a job that had almost nothing to do with the research he is known for, and left again in June. Two months later he is a vice president at the organisation he walked out of in 2022.
The longer version is more interesting, because it is really three stories wearing one headline. There is a disputed firing at a company once valued at $12 billion, with two flatly incompatible accounts of why it happened. There is a research reputation — neural architecture search, post-training,
reinforcement learning
— that survived all of it intact. And there is a Google DeepMind that spent 2026 losing people it did not expect to lose, including the man who co-wrote his most cited paper.
This article covers what the new role actually is, what happened at Thinking Machines Lab and which parts of that account are contested, why the OpenAI interlude was so short, what he built during his first six years at Google, why Google DeepMind wanted him back at this precise moment, and what the whole sequence tells you about how AI talent now moves. Every figure below traces to a source in the References section, and where reporting conflicts, this piece says so rather than picking a side.
Table of contents
What Barret Zoph Is Actually Doing at Google DeepMind
The Thinking Machines Firing That Set Up Barret Zoph’s Year