Former OpenAI executive Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, said goodbye to its two founders, who both returned to OpenAI. Other former OpenAI staffers who worked at Murati’s startup are also returning to the company.
On social media on Wednesday, Murati announced the departure of Barret Zoph, co-founder and CTO of the company. “We’ve broken up with Barret,” Murati said in the post on X. “Soumith Chintala will be the new CTO of Thinking Machines. He is a brilliant and experienced leader who has made significant contributions to the field of AI for over ten years, and he has been a key contributor to our team. We couldn’t be more excited that he is taking on this new responsibility.”
Murati’s announcement did not mention co-founder Luke Metz or other departures.
Just 58 minutes after Murati announced Zoph’s departure, Fidji Simo, CEO of OpenAI applications, announced that Zoph would be returning to OpenAI. “Excited to welcome Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz back to OpenAI! We’ve been working on this for weeks, and we’re thrilled to have them join the team,” Simo wrote in X.
Metz, who? is the co-founder of Thinking Machines, before working for OpenAI for several years in the company’s technical staff. Likewise Schoenholz, which LinkedIn profile still notes he works for Thinking Machines.
Zoph previously worked for OpenAI as VP of research, and before that, worked for six years at Google as a research scientist. Murati, who serves as OpenAI’s CTO until September 2024, leave the company and co-founded Thinking Machines with Zoph and Metz. The startup, where Murati is the CEO, has received significant financial support since then, closed $2 billion seed round Last July, with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz, who led the round, as well as Accel, Nvidia, AMD, and Jane Street, among others. That found the value of the company at $ 12 billion.
TechCrunch has reached out to both Thinking Machines and OpenAI for comment.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
13-15 October 2026
While the exodus of talent among AI giants is common in Silicon Valley, the exodus of founders from startups less than a year after they were founded is particularly notable. The loss of the two co-founders – especially as CTO – can be considered a major setback for Thinking Machines Lab, which has assembled a high-profile team of former OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral AI researchers.
The company has also lost other key personnel, including co-founder Andrew Tulloch, who left to join Meta in October. OpenAI itself has seen many of its co-founders leave to start or join competing ventures, including John Schulman, who left for Anthropic in August 2024 before joining Thinking Machines Lab as Chief Scientist at its launch in February last year.