Barret Zoph, co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, has switched employers once again. Earlier this year, he made a sudden move to OpenAI following a disagreement with Thinking Machines Lab CEO Mira Murati. On Thursday, Alphabet's Google announced that Zoph will join the company as Vice President of Research.

Google spokesperson Thomas Schoenfelder stated in a declaration, "We look forward to Barret's return to Google, bringing his expertise in RL and post-training to Gemini." RL, or reinforcement learning, is an AI training technique.

In January, Zoph departed Thinking Machines, accompanied by fellow co-founder Luke Metz and employee Sam Schoenholz. The trio subsequently joined OpenAI. In fact, they had previously worked at OpenAI before moving to the new startup, which focuses on developing AI systems that collaborate with humans rather than operating autonomously.