Ex-Apple researcher moves to xAI/SpaceX

Chaplot was on the founding research teams at Mistral AI — where he worked on training Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral Large — and later joined the founding team at Thinking Machines Lab to lead research and product efforts. devendrachaplot.github.io He earned a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.Tech in Computer Science (minor in Applied Statistics) from IIT Bombay, and his PhD work focused on building intelligent autonomous navigation agents under advisors Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Abhinav Gupta. devendrachaplot.github.io Chaplot posted the photo with Elon Musk on X on March 13, 2026, and Musk publicly replied “Welcome to @xAI!” in response to that post. financialexpress.com News outlets highlighted Chaplot’s mix of embodied-robotics papers (CVPR/NeurIPS) and multimodal model work (Pixtral/Pixtral Large) as the reason for strong coverage, while several reports also noted criticism and debate online about recent hiring choices at Musk’s AI effort. devendrachaplot.github.io