PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Kartik Khandelwal

Kartik Khandelwal is an AI researcher whose work spans accented-speech recognition and Mistral AI's multimodal, reasoning, coding, and speech models. At IIT Bombay, he earned a B.Tech. in CSE in 2020 and coauthored research on adapting ASR for accented speech. He coauthored Pixtral-12B in 2024 and research on reasoning, audio, and code-agent models in 2025. In 2026, he coauthored Ministral 3 and Voxtral TTS, a multilingual model that generates natural speech from reference audio as short as three seconds. As of October 2026, he works at Mistral AI.

Badges

Timeline

  1. 2020

    Accented speech recognition

    At IIT Bombay, he graduates with a B.Tech. in CSE in 2020, co-advised by Prof. Sunita Sarawagi. In 2020, he coauthors “Black-box Adaptation of ASR for Accented Speech,” pairing an open-source accent-tuned local model with a black-box cloud ASR service.

  2. 2024

    Pixtral 12B

    In 2024, he coauthors Pixtral-12B, a 12-billion-parameter multimodal language model trained to understand images and documents. Its vision encoder takes images at their natural resolution and aspect ratio.

  3. June 2025

    Magistral reasoning model

    In June 2025, he coauthors Magistral, Mistral's first reasoning model and a report on a scalable reinforcement-learning pipeline. Magistral Medium is trained for reasoning with reinforcement learning, and Magistral Small is released under Apache 2.0.

  4. July 2025

    Understanding spoken audio

    In July 2025, he coauthors Voxtral, which introduces Voxtral Mini and Voxtral Small as multimodal audio chat models. They understand spoken audio and text documents, and a 32K context window lets the models handle audio files up to 40 minutes.

  5. August 2025

    Devstral for code agents

    In August 2025, he coauthors the Devstral-Small technical report. The lightweight, open-source 24B model is built for code agents and specializes in agentic software development.

  6. January 2026

    Ministral 3 models

    In January 2026, he coauthors the Ministral 3 report, introducing dense models in 3B, 8B, and 14B sizes. It presents base, instruction-tuned, and reasoning variants, each with image-understanding capabilities.

  7. As of October 2026

    Voxtral TTS at Mistral

    As of October 2026, he works at Mistral AI. In March 2026, he coauthors Voxtral TTS, an expressive multilingual text-to-speech model that generates natural speech with as little as three seconds of reference audio.

Career

  1. NowMistral AI

Education

  1. 2020IIT BombayB.Tech.

From the biography.

  1. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labsIncludes Kartik Khandelwal. The median h-index is 48 at universities and 14 at frontier AI labs. We compare publishing careers, recent citations, dual appointments and job moves across 2,420 university researchers and 308 frontier-lab researchers.
  2. 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a companyIncludes Kartik Khandelwal. We estimate that 16% of AI career moves in the 2020s went from a university to a company; 29% of moves starting at a university went to a company, and 76% ended the university role.
  3. Companies supply the most prior-work hires at 7 of the 9 frontier AI labsIncludes Mistral AI. Our estimates of the organizations where 550 people worked directly before joining 9 frontier AI labs across 620 career transitions, comparing the main feeder organizations per lab.
  4. Of 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google, 446 work there nowIncludes Mistral AI. Our estimates of where the 943 people shaping AI who worked at Google and Google DeepMind work now: 446 at Google and 452 across 278 other organizations.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Kartik Khandelwal yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. people | Preethi Jyothi cse.iitb.ac.in. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Black-box Adaptation of ASR for Accented Speech arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. Pixtral 12B arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Magistral arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Paper page - Magistral huggingface.co. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Voxtral arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Devstral: Fine-tuning Language Models for Coding Agent Applications arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Ministral 3 arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Voxtral TTS arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.