Billionaire businessman Elon Musk announced a fresh round of job cuts at xAI this week — forcing out two more co-founders and parachuting in ‘fixers’ from SpaceX and Tesla to audit the start-up. He has insisted that the company he created in 2023 was “built right first time around”. Musk also took to X to welcome Indian AI researcher Devendra Chaplot to his team.

“I’m joining SpaceX and xAI, working closely with Elon and team to build superintelligence…I’m excited to advance the fields I’ve obsessed over for years, from robotics research to building AI models on the founding teams of Mistral and TML. Both were extraordinary journeys with extraordinary people that shaped how I think about building intelligence from the ground up,” Chaplot wrote on X.

He also heaped praise upon Musk — writing that SpaceX and xAI “combine physical and digital intelligence under a leader who understands hardware at the deepest level”.

“Welcome to xAI!” came the response from his boss.

Musk has led an extensive overhaul of the xAI management after merging the company ⁠with ​his rocket firm SpaceX. The startup is planning a large-scale initial public offering in the coming months.

According to a Financial Times report, co-founder Guodong Zhang (head of the xAI Imagine ​team) told ​colleagues he was leaving after being ⁠blamed for issues with the coding product and relieved of his primary duties by Musk. Fellow co-founder Zihang Dai reportedly left xAI earlier this week. The exits leave the three-year-old AI company with only two of its 12 co-founders.

Who is Devendra Chaplot?

Chaplot is an IIT Bombay alumnus who holds a PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University. He had received an All India Rank 25 in the IIT-JEE in 2010, and an International Rank 5 in the International Mathematics Olympiad.

Chaplot previously worked as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR) Lab — specialising in computer vision and robotics. he was also part of the founding team of Mistral AI and worked as a research scientist — focusing on building advanced AI models.