Barret Zoph
Barret Zoph is an AI researcher and engineer who served as VP of Research for Post-Training at OpenAI, where he led the team responsible for adapting pre-trained language models into products including ChatGPT and the API. He previously worked as a Staff Research Scientist at Google Brain, where he contributed to Neural Architecture Search and sparse mixture-of-experts models. He co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati in 2024 before briefly returning to OpenAI in early 2026 to lead enterprise AI sales, a role he departed from after approximately five months.
“The Thinking Machines Lab co-founder who left the startup for OpenAI in January, is jumping ship again, this time to Google as a vice president of research.”
Source→“Barret Zoph, who left Thinking Machines to return to OpenAI earlier this year, is leaving again, this time for Google DeepMind.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.