Meet Devendra Singh Chaplot, xAI veteran turned Sarvam advisor
What's the story
Indian AI start-up Sarvam has appointed Devendra Singh Chaplot as its new advisor. A graduate of IIT Bombay and a Ph.D. holder from Carnegie Mellon University, Chaplot had previously worked with leading tech giants such as Meta's AI research arm, Mistral AI, Thinking Machines Lab, and Elon Musk's xAI. His extensive experience in machine learning and robotics is expected to significantly enhance Sarvam's capabilities in these fields.
Career trajectory
Impressive academic background
Chaplot has an impressive academic record, having secured an All India Rank of 25 in the IIT-JEE entrance exam and an International Rank of 5 at the International Mathematics Olympiad, both in 2010.
He completed his BTech in Computer Science and Engineering with a minor in Applied Statistics from IIT Bombay in 2014.
He then pursued a PhD in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University, focusing on autonomous navigation and embodied AI.
Professional impact
Extensive industry experience
Chaplot started his career at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), where he worked on robotics and embodied AI for five years.
He co-founded French AI unicorn Mistral AI, where he was instrumental in training models such as Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B, and Mistral Large. He also led the multimodal team behind Pixtral 12B.
Later, he joined Thinking Machines Lab as a founding member and worked on Tinker, a training API for large language models.
Recent positions
His role at xAI
In March 2026, Chaplot joined xAI and SpaceX as part of a high-profile hiring push. He worked directly with Musk on training the Grok family of models while exploring the convergence of physical and digital intelligence across the two companies.