Indian American AI researcher Devendra Singh Chaplot has joined Elon Musk’s xAI and SpaceX where he is working closely with Musk and team to build what he describes as “superintelligence.”
The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay graduate says he will collaborate intimately with Musk and the rest of the SpaceX and xAI teams on more advanced artificial intelligence systems.
The partnership of SpaceX and xAI represents a unique occasion to merge physical and digital intelligence, he says noting the high engineering culture and massive resources in the two companies could facilitate breakthroughs in the creation of advanced AI technologies.
“Together SpaceX and xAI combine physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at the deepest level,” he posted on X. “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,” he wrote. “Both were extraordinary journeys with extraordinary people that shaped how I think about building intelligence from the ground up.”
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“Grateful for everything that brought me here and can’t wait to get started,” he added.
Chaplot graduated with BTech in Computer Science & Engineering and a minor in Applied Statistics from IIT Bombay. He later earned a PhD in machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, a pioneer in AI, working on Building Intelligent Autonomous Navigation Agents.
Chaplot has over the years worked on the convergence of machine learning, robotics, and computer vision. His contribution is the creation of smart systems which are able to perceive the environment and communicate with it.
Previously, Chaplot was part of the Founding Team at Thinking Machines Lab where he worked on Research + Product, including building Tinker, a training API that lets anyone train LLMs.
Before that, he was part of the Founding Team at Mistral AI, where he worked on training Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B & Mistral Large, and led the Multimodal research team that trained Pixtral 12B and Pixtral Large. He also established and led the Mistral U.S. office in Palo Alto.
Earlier he was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research where he worked at the intersection of Computer Vision and Robotics.