Barret Zoph announced on X that he is joining Google DeepMind, returning to the organization where he began his AI career in the Google Brain Residency.
Zoph said he will work on reinforcement learning and post-training, the process of refining a pretrained model so it follows instructions and behaves more usefully. Reuters reported that his title will be Vice President of Research, citing a Google spokesperson.
The move follows Zoph's brief 2026 return to OpenAI after co-founding Thinking Machines Lab. He previously spent six years at Google Brain, where his work included neural architecture search and large language models.