OAI kills co-founders of Thinking Machines

By EngineAI Team | Published on January 19, 2026
OAI kills co-founders of Thinking Machines
Barret Zoph, co-founder and CTO of Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, recently left the company due to claims of misbehavior (thanks to Kylie Robison for breaking the news). Zoph and a few other former employees returned to OAI a few hours later.

The specifics:

At an all-hands meeting and on X, Murati announced the breakup. Zoph was allegedly charged with disclosing confidential information to rivals.

In a post on X, OAI Applications CEO Fidji Simo welcomed the three back and said that the business had been in talks with Zoph for weeks.

Soumith Chintala, a longstanding Meta AI researcher and developer of the PyTorch framework, was appointed CTO of Thinking Machines by Murati.

Following Andrew Tulloch's transfer to Meta in October, the departures represent Thinking Machines' third co-founder departure in less than a year.

Murati's exit from OAI in 2024 shocked the AI community, and now her own co-founders are unpleasantly returning to her previous workplace. As they say, OAI is "nothing without its people," and now, although dramatically, it is regaining a few major ones (and possibly more).

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