Barret Zoph, the Thinking Machines co-founder who defected to OpenAI, is now at Google

Barret Zoph, co-founder of Thinking Machines, left OpenAI in June after a five-month stint heading AI enterprise sales and was subsequently hired as vice president of research at Google, where he will apply his reinforcement-learning and post-training expertise to the Gemini project. His departure from Thinking Machines was later disclosed as a firing, and his brief tenure at OpenAI follows a pattern of rapid executive turnover within the AI industry.