Indian robotics expert and artificial intelligence researcher Devendra Singh Chaplot has joined Elon Musk's companies SpaceX and xAI. Chaplot shared the update on social media platform X, posting a photo with Musk and announcing his new role.

In his post, Chaplot wrote that he would join Musk's team "to build superintelligence".

Academic journey from IIT-Bombay to Carnegie Mellon

Chaplot completed his undergraduate studies at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay in 2014. He graduated with a B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering and also pursued a minor in Applied Statistics, stated an NDTV report.

He later moved to the United States to pursue higher studies and completed his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University's Machine Learning Department. His doctoral work focused on Building Intelligent Autonomous Navigation Agents, according to details available on his website.

Also Read | Trump shares video of US strikes on Iran’s Kharg Island after ‘powerful’ bombing raid | WATCH

Before entering the AI research space, Chaplot spent nearly a year working at Samsung Electronics in South Korea. He later joined Facebook AI Research, where he worked as an AI Research Scientist.

During his time at Facebook, his work focused on the intersection of computer vision and robotics.

In 2020, Chaplot joined Mistral AI, where he led the multimodal research team responsible for training models including Pixtral Large and Pixtral 12B. His work also involved training other models such as Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral Large.

He later became part of the founding team of Thinking Machine Labs, an artificial intelligence research and product company.

Recognition and research achievements

Over the years, Chaplot has received several recognitions for his research work. Among them is the Facebook Fellowship awarded in 2020.

He also won the CVPR 2020 AI Habitat Object Navigation Challenge and received the Best Paper Award in 2018 at the CVPR 2018 Deep Learning for Visual SLAM Workshop.

Joining Elon Musk's AI venture

Chaplot has now joined xAI as a member of the technical staff, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Reflecting on his career, he said he has long been deeply focused on his research interests, describing his path as moving from "robotics research to building AI models on the founding teams of Mistral and TML."

Also Read | Who is Shantanu Narayen? Adobe CEO plans to step down after 18-year tenure, Satya Nadella calls his run 'legendary'

Calling these roles "extraordinary journeys with extraordinary people," Chaplot expressed gratitude for the experiences that led him to his new position.