IIT Bombay Alumnus Joins Elon Musk's SpaceX & xAI: Who Is Devendra Singh Chaplot?
· Free Press Journal
Indian AI researcher and robotics expert Devendra Singh Chaplot announced on X that he was joining SpaceX and xAI to work directly under Elon Musk. In his post, he wrote,"I'm joining SpaceX and xAI, working closely with Elon and team to build superintelligence. Together, SpaceX and xAI combine physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at the deepest level." Musk shared the post and welcomed him simply with, "Welcome to @xAI!" - sending the internet into a frenzy.
Visit sweetbonanza.qpon for more information.
From IIT Bombay to Carnegie Mellon: Who is Devendra Singh Chaplot?
Chaplot, a native of India, started his journey as the All India Rank 25 holder of IIT-JEE 2010. He graduated in 2014 with a first-class degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Bombay, achieving a stellar GPA of 9.51 out of 10. He then completed a Master's in Language Technology at Carnegie Mellon University, followed by a PhD in Machine Learning at CMU, completed in 2020.
I'm joining SpaceX and xAI, working closely with Elon and team to build superintelligence.
— Devendra Chaplot (@dchaplot) March 13, 2026
Together SpaceX and xAI combine physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at the deepest level. Add a high-agency culture with frontier-scale resources, and… pic.twitter.com/tjaPUjGUwK
Where did Chaplot work at?
Chaplot's professional journey reads like a who's who of global AI. He worked as a research scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), focusing on the intersection of machine learning, computer vision, and robotics, and later joined Mistral AI, where he contributed to developing next-generation AI models. At Mistral, he played a key role in training Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mistral Large, and headed the multimodal group for the Pixtral 12B project. Prior to joining Musk, he was also a founding team member at Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.
His research projects have won major global AI competitions, including the CVPR 2019 PointNav Challenge, the CVPR 2020 ObjectNav Challenge, and the NeurIPS 2022 Rearrangement Habitat Challenge. His research has also been featured in MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, and Engadget, alongside the prestigious Facebook Fellowship Award and multiple Best Paper honours.
At SpaceX and xAI, Chaplot is expected to bridge SpaceX's expertise in rocketry and robotics with xAI's large-scale AI models, working towards unified physical-digital intelligence.
His post reads, "I'm joining SpaceX and xAI, working closely with Elon and team to build superintelligence. Together SpaceX and xAI combine physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at the deepest level. Add a high-agency culture with frontier-scale resources, and you get the possibility to achieve something truly unique. I’m excited to advance the fields I’ve obsessed over for years, from robotics research to building AI models on the founding teams of Mistral and TML. Both were extraordinary journeys with extraordinary people that shaped how I think about building intelligence from the ground up. Grateful for everything that brought me here and can’t wait to get started."