Barret Zoph is joining Google DeepMind as vice president of research, returning to the organisation he spent six years in before it was DeepMind at all.
He announced the move on Wednesday, arriving three weeks after Demis Hassabis stepped aside as chief executive in a reshuffle that also saw some DeepMind teams folded back into corporate Google.
The route he took to get back is the more interesting part. Zoph was a research scientist at Google Brain for six years, left for OpenAI where he rose to vice president of research, departed with Mira Murati to co-found Thinking Machines Lab, left that too, briefly returned to OpenAI, and has now gone back to where he started.
Google Brain merged with DeepMind in 2023, so the organisation he is rejoining is not quite the one he left. What has not changed is that the frontier labs are largely staffed by the same few hundred people passing between them, and Meta’s systematic raid on Thinking Machines’ founding team made the point rather bluntly earlier this year.
None of this is a scandal, and nobody involved is doing anything unusual for the field. It is simply that the number of researchers who have trained a frontier model end to end is small enough that every hire is visibly somebody else’s loss.
