PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Devendra Singh Chaplot

Devendra Singh Chaplot is an AI researcher and team leader whose work spans robotic navigation, language models and multimodal systems. He earned a computer science degree at IIT Bombay, developed navigation systems during his Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. and joined Facebook AI Research in 2021. At Mistral AI, he coauthored Mistral 7B and led the multimodal team behind Pixtral; at Thinking Machines Lab, he helped build Tinker and joined SpaceX and xAI in March 2026. Since July 2026, he is an adviser to Sarvam.

Now at
SpaceX and xAI
Works
59
Badges

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 19 October 2026. Citations and h-index are hidden because this OpenAlex record may be incomplete or mix in other authors.

Timeline

  1. 2014

    A computer science degree

    He graduates from IIT Bombay in August 2014 with a B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering and a minor in Applied Statistics.

  2. 2020–2021

    Facebook Fellowship and Active Neural SLAM

    In 2020, Carnegie Mellon names him a Facebook Fellow in computer vision while he is a Ph.D. student in its Machine Learning Department. At CMU, he works with Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Abhinav Gupta on autonomous navigation, including Active Neural SLAM, a system that learns to explore unseen indoor environments. In 2021, he defends his Ph.D. in Machine Learning.

  3. April 2021

    Joining Facebook AI Research

    In April 2021, he joins Facebook AI Research as a research scientist working at the intersection of computer vision and robotics.

  4. 2023

    Coauthoring Mistral 7B

    In 2023, he coauthors Mistral 7B as a member of Mistral AI's founding team. The 7-billion-parameter language model outperforms Llama 2 13B across all evaluated benchmarks.

  5. 2024

    Leading Mistral's Pixtral team

    He leads Mistral AI's multimodal research team, which trains Pixtral 12B and Pixtral Large. Mistral AI announces Pixtral 12B in September 2024 and Pixtral Large in November 2024.

  6. February 2025–October 2025

    Building Tinker at Thinking Machines

    In February 2025, he joins Thinking Machines Lab's founding team as Tech Lead for Data and Pre-training. He works on Tinker, a training API for large language models announced in October 2025.

  7. March 2026

    Joining SpaceX and xAI

    In March 2026, he joins SpaceX and xAI, working closely with Elon and his team to build superintelligence.

  8. Since July 2026

    Advising Sarvam

    In July 2026, he joins Sarvam as an adviser. In October 2026, he serves as an adviser at the AI startup.

Career

  1. From 2026SpaceX
  2. From 2026xAI
  3. 2025Thinking Machines LabFounding Team Member, Tech Lead for Data and Pre-training
  4. From 2023Mistral AIFounding Team Member, Multimodal Research Team Lead
  5. From 2021FAIR (Meta)Research Scientist

Education

  1. 2021Carnegie Mellon UniversityPh.D.
  2. 2014IIT BombayB.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering

From the biography.

  1. Google alumni founded or led 87 other organizations, the most among the labs we compareIncludes Devendra Singh Chaplot. We trace 212 organizations founded or led by AI lab alumni, and 223 career moves between the labs.
  2. 14% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Devendra Singh Chaplot. Our estimates of how university-to-company career transitions changed by decade, including roles added alongside an earlier job.
  3. The median h-index is 53 at universities and 19 at frontier AI labsIncludes Mistral AI. The median h-index is 53 at universities and 19 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, citations and moves to estimate how universities and frontier labs contribute to AI research.
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Carnegie Mellon University. Our estimates of where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led, from education records in cited biographies.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Devendra Singh Chaplot yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Devendra Singh Chaplot devendrachaplot.github.io. Checked 19 October 2026.
  2. Four SCS Students Named Facebook Fellows | Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Department csd.cmu.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  3. Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM – Machine Learning Blog | ML@CMU | Carnegie Mellon University blog.ml.cmu.edu. Checked 19 October 2026.
  4. [2310.06825] Mistral 7B arxiv.org. Checked 19 October 2026.
  5. Meet Devendra Chaplot, IIT-B graduate who may help Sarvam challenge OpenAI and Anthropic - India Today indiatoday.in. Checked 19 October 2026.
  6. Meet Devendra Singh Chaplot, IIT Bombay grad joining Elon Musk to build super intelligence for xAI - India Today indiatoday.in. Checked 19 October 2026.
  7. Sarvam AI appoints Ex-Google Cloud India MD Sreedharan as president | India Business News - The Times of India timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Checked 19 October 2026.