Devendra Chaplot, an AI researcher of Indian descent, joins Elon Musk's xAI
Indian-origin artificial intelligence researcher Devendra Singh Chaplot has joined SpaceX and xAI, becoming one of the latest senior hires as billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk expands his ambitions in artificial intelligence.
In a post on X, Chaplot said he would work closely with Musk and teams at both companies to help build “superintelligence” as the firms move toward integrating AI systems more deeply with hardware technologies.
Chaplot said the collaboration between SpaceX and xAI brings together physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at a deep level. He described the working culture as “high-agency” with access to “frontier-scale resources,” adding that the combination could enable the creation of something truly unique. Musk later reposted Chaplot’s message and welcomed him to the team.
Before joining SpaceX and xAI, Chaplot worked across academia, large technology companies, research labs and AI startups, focusing primarily on robotics, embodied AI and large language models. He was part of the founding team at Mistral AI and contributed to building AI models such as Mistral 7B and Mixtral. He also worked at Thinking Machines Lab, which develops training infrastructure and tools for large foundation models.
Chaplot graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and later completed a PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University. His research has focused on reinforcement learning and navigation in complex environments.
Earlier in his career, he worked at Facebook AI Research, where he contributed to projects involving machine learning, computer vision and robotics.
In his post, Chaplot said he plans to continue working on areas he has been deeply interested in for years, including robotics research and building advanced AI models. He added that his experience at Mistral AI and Thinking Machines Lab significantly shaped his perspective on building intelligence from the ground up.
The appointment comes at a time when xAI has reportedly been experiencing high-profile departures. Reports on Friday said Musk initiated another round of job cuts at xAI, with several cofounders leaving the company amid dissatisfaction with the performance of its coding division. Musk had also recently restructured the management at xAI ahead of a planned initial public offering that could rank among the largest ever if the company proceeds with a merger with SpaceX.
