University of Southern California
Douwe KielaResearch Scientist Director · Google DeepMindResearcher↗
Researcher · Founder · Executive
Barret Zoph
Google DeepMindVice President of Research
Career & education
Current roleGoogle DeepMindAug 2026-presentVice President of Research
Google DeepMindAug 2026-presentPreviously
OpenAIJan 2026-Aug 2026VP, GM B2B
Thinking Machines Lab2024-2026Co-founder and CTOOpenAI2022-2024VP Research, Post-Training
Google Brain2016-2022Research Scientist
OpenAIJan 2026-Aug 2026Thinking Machines Lab2024-2026OpenAI2022-2024Google Brain2016-2022Education
Work and education history is primarily focused on AI-relevant roles and may not be comprehensive.
Citation Trend
Total citations to scholarly work, including research papers, technical reports, books and theses, as recorded by Google Scholar. Each point is a dated snapshot.
citations137,143As of Jul 1, '26
citations+1,692Since last snapshot, Jun 15, '26
Updates 2
MoveBarret Zoph rejoins Google DeepMind
The neural architecture search pioneer is returning to Google as Vice President of Research to work on reinforcement learning and post-training.
August 27, 2026MoveBarret Zoph leaves OpenAI againZoph has departed OpenAI five months after rejoining from Thinking Machines Lab to lead enterprise AI sales.
June 19, 2026Selected contributions
GPT-4 Technical Report
With OpenAI, Joshua Achiam, Steven Adler, Sandhini Agarwal, Lama Ahmad, Ilge Akkaya, Florencia Leoni Aleman and others ·Reported GPT-4's capabilities, limitations and safety evaluations as a text-and-image input model.
PaLM: Scaling Language Modeling with Pathways
With Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Jacob Devlin, Maarten Bosma, Gaurav Mishra, Adam Roberts, Paul Barham and others ·Presented PaLM, a large language model demonstrating gains in reasoning, translation and coding.
Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
With Jason Wei, Yi Tay, Rishi Bommasani, Colin Raffel, Sebastian Borgeaud, Dani Yogatama, Maarten Bosma and others ·Examined abilities that appeared in larger language models but were absent in smaller ones.
References
- Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learningarxiv.org
Zoph and Le coauthorship; automated neural-network design.
- GPT-4 contributions — OpenAIopenai.com
Explicit overall training lead credit in reinforcement learning and alignment.
- TechCrunch — Barret Zoph joins Googletechcrunch.com
Dated report corroborates brief return to OpenAI and June 2026 departure.
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Reviewed August 27, 2026 · Checked for accuracy and new information.
