Barret Zoph is out at OpenAI again after just five months
Five months after returning to OpenAI, Barret Zoph - the company's head of enterprise AI sales - has departed, The Verge has learned. Zoph returned to OpenAI in mid-January after a stint as co-founder and CTO of Thinking Machines Lab, the competing AI company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Shortly after Zoph returned to OpenAI, the company said he would lead its push into enterprise - a significant role at OpenAI, since in recent months it had vowed to stop chasing
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Barret Zoph has departed from OpenAI after serving as head of enterprise AI sales for five months, having rejoined the company in January after co-founding a competing AI company. His departure matters because OpenAI had positioned enterprise as a key revenue driver ahead of its planned IPO, making this a significant leadership change. Zoph's path illustrates tensions within the AI industry: he originally left OpenAI in fall 2024 to join Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, but left that role abruptly in January following reports of alleged misconduct involving an undisclosed workplace relationship. Murati and OpenAI have had their own contentious history, including her brief tenure as CEO during Altman's 2023 ouster and subsequent testimony that she couldn't trust everything Altman said.
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