Devendra Singh Chaplot: IIT-Bombay Alumnus Who Joined Elon Musk's SpaceX, xAI

Elon Musk has welcomed Devendra Chaplot, an Indian robotics expert and AI researcher, to his aerospace firm, SpaceX, and artificial intelligence venture xAI.

In a post on X, Chaplot shared a photo with Musk and said he would join the billionaire's team "to build superintelligence."

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… pic.twitter.com/tjaPUjGUwK

— Devendra Chaplot (@dchaplot) March 13, 2026

Musk responded to the post, welcoming Chaplot to xAI.

Welcome to @xAI! https://t.co/5tAdHPJmfx

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 13, 2026

Who Is Devendra Chaplot?

An alumnus of IIT-Bombay, Chaplot has worked in the AI and robotics sector for years. He graduated from IIT-Bombay in 2014 with a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering and a minor in Applied Statistics.

Chaplot completed his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department, where he worked on Building Intelligent Autonomous Navigation Agents, according to his website.

Chaplot also worked for almost a year at Samsung Electronics in South Korea. He later joined Facebook AI Research. As an AI Research Scientist, he worked at the intersection of Computer Vision and Robotics in the firm.

In 2020, the robotics expert joined Mistral AI, where he led the Multimodal research team that trained Pixtral Large and Pixtral 12B. Chaplot also focused on training Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B & Mistral Large.

He later became a member of the founding team of Thinking Machine Labs, an AI research and product firm.

The AI expert has won multiple awards, including the Facebook Fellowship in 2020, the CVPR 2020 AI Habitat Object Navigation Challenge and the Best Paper Award in 2018 at the CVPR 2018 Deep Learning for Visual SLAM Workshop, for his research over the years.

Chaplot joins xAI as a member of their technical staff, his LinkedIn profile revealed.

In his post, the researcher said that he has been obsessed with his areas of study for years, "robotics research to building AI models on the founding teams of Mistral and TML."

Calling his tenures "extraordinary journeys with extraordinary people", Chaplot said he was grateful for everything that led him to the current posts.