IITian joins Elon Musk's xAI and SpaceX
Devendra Singh Chaplot, an IIT Bombay and Carnegie Mellon alumnus, just landed a spot at SpaceX and xAI.
He'll be working directly under Elon Musk, building next-level AI that blends robotics with digital brains: think smarter Starships and advanced humanoid robots.
Chaplot's impressive resume
Chaplot has a Ph.D. in machine learning from Carnegie Mellon, where he focused on getting robots to navigate the real world.
He co-founded Thinking Machines Lab to push the limits of AI training tech, and previously worked as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research
and has led award-winning projects, including teams that won CVPR-2019 PointNav, CVPR-2020 ObjectNav, NeurIPS-2022 Rearrangement Habitat Challenges and the Visual-Doom AI Competition 2017, so he's no stranger to big challenges.
xAI's valuation and ambitious goals
Chaplot joins amid reports valuing xAI at roughly $125 billion-$250 billion.
The goal? Launch solar-powered satellites that power orbital AI data centers, making computing cheaper and more scalable for space and terrestrial applications.
If you're into space, AI, or just wild tech frontiers, this is one to watch.