Barret Zoph is going back to Google, six years and two startups later

Barret Zoph is returning to Google DeepMind as vice president of research after stints at Google Brain, OpenAI, and co-founding Thinking Machines Lab, joining the organization amid a leadership reshuffle that folded several DeepMind teams into Google. His expertise in neural architecture search and large-scale model training aligns with DeepMind’s shift toward product-focused Gemini cycles, while the move highlights ongoing talent circulation among frontier AI labs.