Indian-origin AI researcher Devendra Chaplot joins Elon Musk's xAI

Indian-origin artificial intelligence (AI) researcher Devendra Singh Chaplot has joined Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI, one of the latest senior hires in the billionaire's expanding AI ambitions.

In a post on X, Chaplot said he will work closely with Musk and the teams at both companies “to build superintelligence,” as SpaceX and xAI move to integrate AI more tightly with hardware.



Chaplot wrote that SpaceX and xAI together “combine physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at the deepest level" and described the culture as “high-agency” with “frontier-scale resources.” He said this combination creates the possibility to build “something truly unique" and added that he is “grateful for everything that brought me here.”

Musk reposted his update and welcomed Chaplot to the team.

Before this appointment, Chaplot worked across academia, Big Tech, research, and AI startups, with a focus on robotics, embodied AI, and large language models (LLMs). He was part of the founding team at French tech company Mistral AI, contributing to models such as Mistral 7B and Mixtral, and was also at Thinking Machines Lab (TML), which works on large-scale training infrastructure and tools for foundation models.

An IIT Bombay graduate and Carnegie Mellon University PhD in machine learning, Chaplot’s research has focussed on reinforcement learning and navigation in complex environments. Earlier, at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), he worked on machine learning, computer vision, and robotics projects.

In his post, Chaplot said he is looking to continue work in areas he has “obsessed over for years,” including robotics research and building AI models, and noted that his time at Mistral and TML shaped how he thinks about “building intelligence from the ground up.”

This comes as xAI sees high-profile exits. It was reported on Friday that Musk triggered a fresh wave of job cuts at xAI, with more cofounders pushed out amid his dissatisfaction with the underperformance of the startup's coding division.

Musk last month overhauled the management of xAI, ahead of a planned initial public offering (IPO) that could ‌rank among ⁠the largest ⁠ever after merging the company with SpaceX.