Who is Devendra Singh Chaplot? IIT Bombay alum joins xAI to build superintelligence, welcomed by Elon Musk
Indian artificial intelligence researcher and robotics expert Devendra Singh Chaplot announced that he will join the SpaceX and xAI team to create super intelligence. He said he would work directly under Elon Musk.
In a viral X post, Chaplot wrote: “I am joining SpaceX and xAI, working closely with Elon and his team to develop superintelligence.”
“Together, SpaceX and xAI combine physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at the deepest level. Add high corporate culture with edge-scale resources and you have the opportunity to achieve something truly unique,” he said.
The technician shared that he is excited to advance in the fields.
“I have been obsessed with this topic 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 my thinking about building intelligence from scratch.”
Expressing his gratitude, Chaplot said, “I’m grateful for everything that brought me here and I can’t wait to get started.” he said.
Who is Devendra Singh Chaplot?
Devendra Singh Chaplot is an IIT Bombay Computer Science graduate with 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 was previously a Research Scientist at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) Lab, working at the intersection of Machine Learning, Computer Vision, and Robotics.
He led the design of many AI systems that won the CVPR-2019 PointNav and CVPR-2020 ObjectNav, NeurIPS-2022 Refactoring Habitat Challenges, and the Visual-Doom AI Competition 2017.
Chaplot is a Facebook Fellowship Award winner and his research has received Best Paper and Best Demo awards at leading AI conferences.
He also worked at Samsung Electronics Headquarters in South Korea for about a year.
His research has also been featured in many popular media outlets, including MIT Technology Review, TechCrunch, Engadget, Popular Science, Kotaku, and Daily Mail.
Elon Musk welcomed Devendra Chaplot
xAI boss Elon Musk shared Devendra Chaplot’s post and invited him to the team. “Welcome to @xAI!” wrote Musk.
On Friday, Musk apologized for xAI’s past hiring shortcomings and announced that interview records were being reviewed to re-engage overlooked candidates; This signaled a talent-focused reset during the company’s fundamental rebuilding.
He had previously likened xAI’s overhaul to Tesla’s early iterations, highlighting its bold relaunch model to spur innovation in AI development.
