Barret Zoph, co-founder of Thinking Machines, has been hired by Google to serve as Vice President of Research. Zoph left OpenAI in October 2024 and co-founded Thinking Machines with Mira Murati. Later, in January of the same year, he returned to OpenAI after being fired and left the company in June after only five months. Google says they look forward to Zoph bringing his expertise in reinforcement learning and post-training methods to the Gemini project.