xAI/SpaceX hires Devendra Chaplot
Devendra Chaplot — ex‑Mistral/TML and a FAIR robotics PhD — joined xAI/SpaceX to work on merging physical and digital intelligence, a hire that signals big‑model builders moving into embodied AI. Chaplot’s move underscores a cross‑pollination of foundation‑model expertise and robotics control research inside commercial labs. Teams that can bridge large‑model reasoning and low‑latency control are being prioritized.
Chaplot posted his move in mid‑March 2026 on his personal site and X updates, announcing the shift to SpaceX/xAI in March 2026. (devendrachaplot.github.io) Elon Musk publicly replied “Welcome to @xAI!” to Chaplot’s announcement, according to media coverage of the X exchange. (indianexpress.com) Chaplot was a founding member of Thinking Machines Lab and earlier part of Mistral’s founding team, and his bio notes he established and led Mistral’s U.S. office in Palo Alto. (devendrachaplot.github.io) His engineering work at Mistral credits him on training Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral Large and leading the multimodal effort that produced Pixtral 12B and Pixtral Large. (devendrachaplot.github.io) He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon’s Machine Learning Department where he worked with Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Abhinav Gupta; his thesis is titled “Building Intelligent Autonomous Navigation Agents.” (devendrachaplot.github.io) Chaplot’s published robotics record includes a Science Robotics paper on real‑world object navigation (2023), an ICCV navigation paper (Mar 2023), an ICLR 2023 spotlight on Multi‑skill Mobile Manipulation (M3), the HM3D‑Semantics dataset release, and a NeurIPS 2022 Habitat Rearrangement Challenge win. (devendrachaplot.github.io) Google Scholar lists roughly 22,127 citations and an h‑index of 47 for Chaplot as of March 2026, reflecting the academic visibility behind his industry roles. (scholar.google.com) SpaceX formally acquired xAI on February 2, 2026 and announced plans to pursue orbital data‑center infrastructure, a corporate move noted in SpaceX’s February update. (spacex.com) Chaplot’s résumé explicitly ties foundation‑model training credits (Mistral 7B, Pixtral) to embodied‑AI benchmarks and datasets (HM3D, Habitat Rearrangement), combining the exact skillset SpaceX/xAI have framed in their merged compute+hardware strategy. (devendrachaplot.github.io)
