Devendra Singh Chaplot, an IIT Bombay and Carnegie Mellon University alumnus who has worked at Meta's AI research arm, Mistral AI, Thinking Machines Lab and, most recently, Elon Musk's xAI, has joined Indian AI startup Sarvam as an adviser to help build frontier models.
The announcement, made by entrepreneur Harveen Singh Chadha, coincided with the first day of Sarvam Epoch, the company's inaugural frontier AI conference, where Chaplot appeared on stage alongside Sarvam co-founder Vivek Raghavan for a technical session.
Who Is Devendra Singh Chaplot
Chaplot's academic record includes an All India Rank of 25 in the IIT-JEE entrance examination and an International Rank of 5 at the International Mathematics Olympiad, both in 2010.
He went on to complete a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering, with a minor in Applied Statistics, from IIT Bombay in 2014, before pursuing a PhD in Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University, where his research centred on autonomous navigation and embodied AI.
During this period, he won some of the field's most competitive benchmarks, including the CVPR 2019 PointNav Challenge, the CVPR 2020 ObjectNav Challenge and the NeurIPS 2022 Rearrangement Habitat Challenge.
Career At Frontier Of AI
Chaplot began his industry career at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), where he spent five years working on robotics and embodied AI.
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He went on to co-found French AI unicorn Mistral AI, where he played a central role in training models including Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral Large, and led the multimodal team behind Pixtral 12B. He was subsequently part of the founding team at Thinking Machines Lab, the startup led by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, where he worked on Tinker, a training API for large language models.
In March this year, Chaplot joined Elon Musk's xAI and SpaceX as part of a high-profile hiring push, working directly with Musk on training the Grok family of models while exploring the convergence of physical and digital intelligence across the two companies.
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Significance For Sarvam
Sarvam AI, built under India's IndiaAI Mission to develop a homegrown large language model stack trained on Indian compute, has positioned itself around deep multilingual capability for Indian languages rather than English-first frontier performance, having released open models such as Sarvam-M and its 30-billion and 105-billion parameter systems.
Chaplot's addition as an adviser comes as the company convenes senior industry figures, including Google DeepMind senior director Manish Gupta and Peak XV venture partner Aaditya Sood, at Sarvam Epoch, billed as India's frontier AI conference, running across separate editions for developers and enterprise leaders on 30 and 31 July.
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