person
Barret Zoph
Co-founder Thinking Machines Lab; ex-OpenAI
Co-founded Thinking Machines Lab in 2024 with Mira Murati. Previously co-led GPT-4 post-training at OpenAI. Earlier at Google Brain working on Neural Architecture Search and the Switch Transformer.
current Co-founder, Chief Scientist, Thinking Machines Lab
past Researcher / VP of Research, OpenAI
Strategy positions
Alignment firstendorses
Solve technical alignment before capability thresholds closeArgues post-training is where most safety properties are made or broken; co-founded Thinking Machines partly to extend this view to a fully open lab.
Most of what people think of as 'capabilities' is shaped after pretraining. Post-training is also where most of what we think of as alignment is decided.
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with Barret Zoph's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-25.