ChatGPT maker and artificial intelligence major OpenAI has onboarded three former staff — Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz, who had left to join former executive alumna Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. The back-and-forth highlights AI companies' war for talent in a multi-billion-dollar sector.
The hirings were announced on social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), by OpenAI's CEO of Applications Fidji Simo, who wrote: “Excited to welcome Barret Zoph, Luke Metz, and Sam Schoenholz back to OpenAI! 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. More to come on what they’ll focus on soon!”
Thinking Machines appoints Soumith Chintala as CTO
Meanwhile, Murati, the former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI and founder-CEO of Thinking Machines, in her post simply noted that the startup has “parted ways with Barret Zoph”.
She added, “Soumith Chintala will be the new CTO of Thinking Machines. 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. We could not be more excited to have him take on this new responsibility.”
All not clear: Do we know what happened behind the scenes?
Bloomberg reported an internal memo to OpenAI staff in which Simo stated: “Just to clear the air — Barret (Zoph) told Mira (Murati) on Monday (12 January) he was considering leaving and she fired him today. You may have seen information from sources that Barret was fired from Thinking Machines for ‘unethical reasons.’ We do not share these concerns.”
Zoph did not respond to queries on what happened behind the scenes, the report added.
Notably, Fortune reported that Zoph and Metz were cofounders of Thinking Machines alongside Murati, while Schoenholz was a member of the “founding team” of researchers and engineers.
Fortune also said that Zoph, OpenAI, and Thinking Machines either declined to respond or did not respond to queries on the matter.
AI growth sees companies battle for top talent
The report added that is further speculation of at least two more Thinking Machines researchers, Lia Guy and Ian O’Connell leaving — with the former headed to OpenAI.
All this has been a blow for Thinking Machines, which raised $2 billion seed funding in July — the largest of its kind in Silicon Valley. In late 2025, cofounder Andrew Tulloch left to join Meta AI. Murati herself reportedly turned down a pretty $1 billion package from Meta to establish her own company.
In July 2025, Wired reported that Murati's team were offered $200 million to $1 billion worth packages from Mark Zuckerberg's Meta Superintelligence Labs that each turned down. The scene seems to have changed this year.
The Fortune report noted that startups are finding it hard to compete with the packages offered by bigwigs like Meta, Google and OpenAI. It cited a source say that most of the departures at Thinking Machines was motivated by money.
(With inputs from Bloomberg)