The game of musical chairs among AI executives continues. Barrett Zoff, the co-founder of AI startup Thinking Machines who left the company and rejoined OpenAI earlier this year, has found yet another job.
Zoph worked at OpenAI for two years, leaving in October 2024, and co-founded Thinking Machines with Mira Murati, who left AI Labs the month before. In January, Zoph and Luke Metz, another Thinking Machines co-founder, took a very dramatic exit from the startup and returned to OpenAI. It was later revealed that Zoff had been fired.
His return didn’t really stick. Zph was with OpenAI for just five months, where he was named head of AI enterprise sales. He left the company in June. And now we know where he landed.
Zoff became vice president of research at Google (which happens to be another company he previously worked for). “We look forward to Ms. Barrett returning to Google and bringing her RL and post-training expertise to Gemini,” a Google spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.
TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI and Google for more information.
It’s not always easy to guess why technology company executives seem to be spending less time in their roles. Attrition rates in the AI industry are high, and OpenAI has particularly high attrition rates. Despite gearing up for an IPO and being one of the most powerful players in the technology industry, OpenAI has lost a number of key staff over the past eight months. From the resignation of its COO to the recent loss of one of its data center executives, senior leadership changes have left onlookers scratching their heads.
This story has been updated to include the fact that Zoph has been fired from Thinking Machines.
