Barret Zoph joins Google DeepMind as VP of Research

Barret Zoph, a co-founder of the artificial intelligence startup Thinking Machines Lab, is joining Alphabet-owned unit Google DeepMind as Vice President of Research. Zoph previously spent five months at OpenAI, where he was tasked with heading AI enterprise sales, before leaving the company in June. He had initially left OpenAI in October 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines with Mira Murati. Zoph also has prior experience at Google Brain, which merged with DeepMind to form Google DeepMind in 2023, where he spent six years as a research scientist. A Google spokesperson stated that Zoph will bring his expertise in reinforcement learning and post-training to Gemini.