Key researchers return to OpenAI from former CTO Mira Murati's Thinking Labs

OpenAI on Wednesday announced the return of three high-profile researchers to its team, in a positive development for its technical leadership.

Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz have officially rejoined the company, following a brief stint at former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati's artificial intelligence (AI) startup.

The return of the trio is good news for the Sam Altman-led company, which was hit by multiple departures last year amid an intensifying war for talent in the AI space.


The announcement was made by OpenAI applications CEO Fidji Simo, who confirmed that the return had been in the works for several weeks.

Under the new organisational structure, Barret Zoph will report directly to Simo, while Metz and Schoenholz will report to Zoph.


Simo did not divulge specific project details but their return is expected to strengthen OpenAI’s core research and post-training capabilities when it faces breakneck competition, especially from Google.

Murati took to X to announce the exit. "We have parted ways with Barret Zoph. Soumith Chintala will be the new CTO of Thinking Machines," her post on X read.


Chintala is an experienced figure in the AI community, largely known for his contributions at Meta and his role as a cocreator of PyTorch, the open-source machine learning framework.

Murati launched Thinking Machines in early 2025 as a public benefit corporation. Based in San Francisco, the startup was founded to build "collaborative" multimodal AI systems with humans, rather than pushing for full automation.