The sport of musical chairs for AI executives continues. Barret Zoph, a co-founder of the AI startup Pondering Machines who left the corporate earlier this yr to rejoin OpenAI, has discovered one more job.
Zoph spent two years at OpenAI and left in October 2024 to co-found Pondering Machines with Mira Murati, who had left the AI lab the month prior. In January, Zoph and one other Pondering Machines co-founder, Luke Metz, fairly dramatically departed from the startup to return to OpenAI. It was later revealed that Zoph had been fired.
His return didn’t fairly stick. Zoph spent solely 5 months at OpenAI, the place he was tasked with heading AI enterprise gross sales. He left the company in June. And now we all know the place he landed.
Zoph has taken a place as vice chairman of analysis at Google (which occurs to be one other firm the place he beforehand labored). “We look ahead to Barret returning to Google and bringing his RL and post-training experience to Gemini,” a Google spokesperson advised the Wall Street Journal.
TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI and Google for extra data.
It’s not all the time straightforward to divine why tech executives appear to be spending much less time of their roles. The turnover charge within the AI trade is high, and it’s been particularly excessive at OpenAI — an organization that, regardless of readying itself for an IPO and being one of the crucial highly effective presences within the tech world, has misplaced quite a lot of crucial employees during the last eight months. The turnover of high-level executives — from the departure of its COO to the latest lack of one in every of its high information heart execs — has left onlookers scratching their heads.
This story has been up to date to incorporate the truth that Zoph was fired from Pondering Machines.