Three Indian-origin engineers have been appointed to key leadership roles at xAI as it prepares for a merger with SpaceX and a potential IPO. Devendra Chaplot, Aman Madaan and Aditya Gupta will lead core AI functions including training, infrastructure and reinforcement learning, strengthening the company’s push in the global AI race.

Three Indian-origin engineers, Devendra Chaplot, Aman Madaan, and Aditya Gupta, have been appointed to major leadership roles at Elon Musk's xAI as the company prepares to merge with SpaceX ahead of a highly anticipated IPO. The reorganisation aims to strengthen xAI's competitive position in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence landscape.

Devendra Chaplot: Leading pre-training operations

Chaplot will lead pre-training, the foundational stage where AI models learn from massive datasets. An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-Bombay), he later earned a PhD in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon University, where his research focused on autonomous navigation systems.

Chaplot was an NTSE scholar and ranked 25th in the IIT-JEE examination. Before joining Musk's companies, he worked at Thinking Machines Lab and earlier at Mistral AI, contributing to models including Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral Large. His work combines machine learning, robotics and computer vision to develop systems capable of understanding and interacting with their surroundings.