Elon Musk has started to expand his xAI team and the one of the high-profile recruits is Devendra Singh Chaplot, an Indian AI researcher and robotics expert. Chaplot announced that he is joining both SpaceX and xAI to work directly under Musk to “build superintelligence.”
Musk welcomed him publicly on X with a simple welcome message.Chaplot shared a photo with Musk on X: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.Musk replied: “Welcome to @xAI!”
Who is Devendra Chaplot
Chaplot’s journey began in Mumbai. He graduated from IIT-Bombay in 2014 with a B.Tech in Computer Science and Engineering and a minor in Applied Statistics. He then moved to the US to pursue a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning Department, where his research focused on building intelligent autonomous navigation agents.
This arm teaches AI systems to understand and move through physical environments on their own.After CMU, Chaplot spent nearly a year at Samsung Electronics’ headquarters in South Korea, before joining Facebook AI Research (FAIR) as a Research Scientist.
He has worked in machine learning, computer vision, and robotics fields that are central to how AI systems perceive and interact with the real world. He was at Facebook for 5 years and 4 months (From May 2018 to Aug 2023).After Facebook, Chaplot moved into the world of large language model development. In 2023 he joined Mistral AI – the French AI startup that has emerged as one of Europe’s most prominent challengers to OpenAI and Google.
He worked as AI Research Scientist in Mistral till February 2025.He later became part of the founding team of Thinking Machine Labs, an AI research and product company led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, before joining Musk’s growing empire. Chaplot joins xAI as a member of the technical staff, according to his LinkedIn profile.Chaplot’s hiring announcement comes days after when Musk publicly apologised for what he described as past hiring misses at xAI.“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up. Same thing happened with Tesla,” he said, adding in a separate post that: “Many talented people over the past few years were declined an offer or even an interview @xAI. My apologies. @BarisAkis and I are going through the company interview history and reaching back out to promising candidates.”