Barret Zoph has returned to Google DeepMind as vice president of research, marking his reunion with the lab after a six-year absence. Zoph co-founded Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati, who temporarily led OpenAI in 2024.
Zoph's career has included roles as a Google Brain research scientist for approximately six years before joining OpenAI, where he served as vice president of research. He later co-founded Thinking Machines Lab as chief technology officer, a position that ended in January 2026 following allegations of misconduct regarding an undisclosed workplace relationship. He subsequently returned to OpenAI for a five-month stint alongside Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz, focusing on enterprise initiatives.
Zoph's research expertise centers on foundational AI work, including neural architecture search and large-scale model training. His appointment to Google DeepMind occurs during a period of organizational transition at the lab.
Leadership Changes at Google DeepMind
Google DeepMind has experienced significant staffing shifts in recent months. Demis Hassabis stepped back from day-to-day operations in early August to become chairman and Alphabet's chief scientist, with CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu assuming operational leadership. Chief scientist Jeff Dean and senior staff members including Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le departed to launch Discovery Loop, a competing startup.
Data from UK intelligence firm Zeki shows DeepMind's hiring-to-departures ratio declined from approximately 12-to-1 in the second quarter of 2023 to about 2-to-1 in the third quarter of 2026. Among departing staff, 25% joined Anthropic, 21% went to Meta, and 14% moved to OpenAI. The lab's share of hires across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa dropped from 49% in 2022–2023 to 18.6% in 2025–2026.
