Thinking Machines Lab, the company co-founded and led by OpenAI’s former CTO Mira Murati, has announced a leadership change and departure.
The company announced that it has parted ways with CTO Barret Zoph, while reports suggested that the company terminated Zoph due to ‘unethical conduct.’
WIRED reported that Zoph had shared confidential company information with competitors, citing a source familiar with the company.
In addition, Luke Metz, a co-founder of Thinking Machines Lab, and Sam Schoenholz, also a part of the founding team, have also left the company. The three were also all former OpenAI employees.
In a surprising turn of events, they are all now back to OpenAI, as announced by Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of applications. “This has been in the works for several weeks, and we’re thrilled to have them join the team. Barret will report to me; Luke and Sam will report into Barret,” she announced in a post on X.
The WIRED report also states that Simo “doesn’t share the same concerns about Zoph as Thinking Machines”.
Replacing Zoph as the CTO is Soumith Chintala, who was previously a member of technical staff at Thinking Machines and also the co-creator of the renowned Meta framework, PyTorch.
Chintala is also an alumni of the Vellore Institute of Technology in India, having earned a bachelor’s in technology degree in information science in 2009.
“He is a brilliant and seasoned leader who has made important contributions to the AI field for over a decade, and he’s been a major contributor to our team,” said Murati.
In late 2024, Murati announced her departure as the CTO of OpenAI after six years, citing that she wanted to “create the time and space” for her own exploration. At the beginning of 2025, she announced ‘Thinking Machines Lab’ and has since raised $2 billion in investments.
Murati has been joined by several other OpenAI employees. Notably, John Schulman, one of the co-founders of OpenAI, left last August to join Anthropic and is now with Thinking Machines.
The recently announced ‘Tinker API’ is the first offering from Thinking Machines. It helps AI and machine learning researchers and developers access compute easily, enabling them to focus on data and algorithms for their projects. Tinker handles the heavy lifting of organising and managing compute, while researchers can concentrate on other core aspects of their work.
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