Thinking Machines Cofounders Barrett Zoff and Luke Metz are leaving NoAreLabs and rejoining Open, the creator of ChatGupt, announced Wednesday. Openei’s CEO of Applications, Fudge Simu, shared the news in a memo to staff this afternoon.

Two narratives are already forming about what led to the departures. The news was first reported by technology reporter Kyle Robeson at X, who wrote that Zoff was fired for “unethical conduct.”

Sources close to Thinking Machines alleged that Zoff shared confidential company information with competitors. Wired was unable to confirm this information with Zoff, who did not immediately respond to Wired’s request for comment.

Zoff told Thinking Machines CEO Meera Marathi on Monday that he was considering leaving, according to Simo’s memo. He was subsequently fired on Wednesday. Simo wrote that Opanai does not share the same concerns about Zooff as Marathi.

The personnel shakeup is a big win for Openi, which recently lost its VP of research, Jerry Twerk. Sam Schoenholz of Third Thinking Machines is also joining Openai, according to the company’s announcement.

The departure is a blow to the thinking machines, Which also lost another co-founderAndrew Tulloch, in November when he took a new job at Meta. a Post to xMarathi confirmed Zooff’s ouster, saying Sumith Chantala would replace him as the startup’s chief technology officer.

Zoff and Metz left Openai in late 2024 to start Thinking Machines with Moretti, the former chief technology officer of ChatGPT maker. Zoff was previously Vice President of Post-Training at Openai, where he led teams that made final improvements to the AI ​​model before it was deployed in products such as ChatGPT and Openai’s API. Metz worked at Openai for two years during his first stint at the company and participated in projects such as ChatGPT and the O1 AI Reasoning Model.

Simo told employees in his memo that Zoff would report directly to him, and that Metz and Schoenholz would work under him. He said the timeline for the hiring announcement was accelerated, so he still has to work out some details about his role.

Openai is one of several well-funded AI startups led by former top Thinking Machines Lab researchers, reflecting an incredible appetite among investors to cash in on the AI ​​race. Last year, Murti’s startup was last valued at $12 billion, and was recently in talks to raise more. 4 billion at a cost of 50 billion. The startup’s main product today is called Tinker, which allows developers to customize AI models on their datasets.