Battle for AI talent heats up as former OpenAI staff who left for Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines return
ChatGPT maker and artificial intelligence specialist OpenAI has hired three former staff members, Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz, who left to join executive graduate Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab. This back-and-forth highlights the battle AI companies are waging for talent in a multibillion-dollar industry.
The hires were announced by OpenAI Applications CEO Fidji Simo on social media platform
Thinking Machines appoints Soumith Chintala as CTO
Meanwhile, Murati, former Chief Technology Officer of OpenAI and founder-CEO of Thinking Machines, stated in his post that the startup had “parted ways with Barret Zoph.”
He added: “Soumith Chintala will be the new CTO of Thinking Machines. He is a bright and experienced leader who has made significant contributions to the field of AI for over a decade and has made great contributions to our team. We couldn’t be more excited to have him take on this new responsibility.”
Not everything is clear: Do we know what happens 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) that he was considering leaving on Monday, January 12, 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,” Bloomberg reported.
The report stated that Zoph did not respond to questions about what was happening behind the scenes.
Fortune specifically reported that Zoph and Metz were co-founders of Thinking Machines along with Murati, while Schoenholz was a member of the “founding team” of researchers and engineers.
Fortune also said that Zoph, OpenAI, and Thinking Machines either refused to respond or did not respond to questions on the matter.
AI growth shows companies scrambling for top talent
Speculation continues that at least two more Thinking Machines researchers, Lia Guy and Ian O’Connell, will leave, with the former heading to OpenAI, the report said.
All of this is a blow for Thinking Machines, which raised $2 billion in startup funding in July, the largest of its kind in Silicon Valley. In late 2025, co-founder Andrew Tulloch left to join Meta AI. Murati reportedly turned down a nearly $1 billion package from Meta to establish his own company.
In July 2025, Wired reported that Murati’s team had been offered packages worth $200 million to $1 billion from Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Superintelligence Labs, each of which they had rejected. The landscape seems to have changed this year.
The Fortune report noted that startups are having a hard time competing with packages offered by bigwigs like Meta, Google and OpenAI. A source was quoted as saying that most of the departures at Thinking Machines were due to money.
(With input from Bloomberg)
