creators

Barret Zoph - Google DeepMind VP of Research

Barret Zoph pioneered neural architecture search, led post-training at OpenAI, co-founded Thinking Machines Lab, and joined Google DeepMind in 2026.

Barret Zoph is an American computer scientist best known for neural architecture search (NAS), the use of reinforcement learning to design neural network architectures automatically. He began his career in the Google Brain Residency programme and spent about six years at Google, where he co-authored the 2016 paper 'Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning' with Quoc Le and worked on sparse language models and AutoML. He then joined OpenAI as VP of research for post-training, where his team worked on alignment, tool use, evaluations, ChatGPT, search and multimodality. He left OpenAI in October 2024 to co-found Thinking Machines Lab with Mira Murati as chief technology officer; the company came out of stealth in February 2025. In January 2026 Zoph left Thinking Machines Lab and returned to OpenAI to head enterprise sales, a job he held for about five months. In August 2026 he announced he was joining Google DeepMind as vice president of research, working on reinforcement learning and post-training for Gemini.

Specialization

reinforcement learning, post-training, neural architecture search, large language models

Country

United States