Who is Devendra Singh Chaplot? IIT Bombay alum joins xAI to build superintelligence, welcomed by Elon Musk

Devendra Singh Chaplot, an Indian AI researcher and robotics expert, announced that he is joining SpaceX and xAI to team to build superintelligence. He said he will work directly under Elon Musk.

In a viral X post, Chaplot 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. Add a high-agency culture with frontier-scale resources, and you get the possibility to achieve something truly unique,” he said.

The techie shared that he was 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,” Chaplot wrote in his post. “Both were extraordinary journeys with extraordinary people that shaped how I think about building intelligence from the ground up.”

Expressing gratitude, Chaplot said, “Grateful for everything that brought me here and can’t wait to get started.”

Who is Devendra Singh Chaplot?

Devendra Singh Chaplot is an IIT Bombay Computer Science graduate who has a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University.

He was a Research Scientist at Mistral AI working on building the next generation of AI models.

According to his LinkedIn bio, he has previously worked as a Research Scientist at the Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Lab, working at the intersection of Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Robotics.

He has led the design of several AI systems, which won the CVPR-2019 PointNav and CVPR-2020 ObjectNav, NeurIPS-2022 Rearrangement Habitat Challenges and the Visual-Doom AI Competition 2017.

Chaplot is a recipient of the Facebook Fellowship Award, and his research has received Best Paper and Best Demo awards at leading AI conferences.

He has also worked at Samsung Electronics HQ in South Korea for about a year.

His research has also been featured in several popular media outlets such as MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, Engadget, Popular Science, Kotaku, and Daily Mail.

Elon Musk welcomes Devendra Chaplot

xAI boss Elon Musk shared Devendra Chaplot's post and welcomed him to the team. “Welcome to @xAI!” wrote Musk.

On Friday, Musk apologised for xAI's past hiring misses and announced a review of interview records to re-engage overlooked candidates, signalling a talent-focused reset amid the company's foundational rebuild.

He had previously likened xAI's overhaul to Tesla's early iterations, highlighting a pattern of bold restarts to drive innovation in AI development.