Google hired Barret Zoph as a vice president of research to work on reinforcement learning and post-training for Gemini. Zoph spent 2016 to 2022 at Google as a research scientist, then ran post-training at OpenAI before leaving to co-found Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati in early 2025. Murati fired him in January and told staff he had “a history of performance, conduct and trust issues,” though Zoph says she only acted after he’d given notice that he was leaving for another job. He went back to OpenAI to sell its Codex coding tools to businesses, then left again. Google has lost several senior researchers lately, among them Jeff Dean, Noam Shazeer, and Nobel laureate John Jumper.
