Devendra Chaplot has joined xAI from Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Chaplot is an accomplished AI researcher with a background spanning Meta's FAIR lab and Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on embodied AI, navigation, and agents that can perceive and interact with physical environments.
His work on training AI systems to navigate complex 3D spaces and make decisions based on visual input has been widely recognized in the robotics and embodied intelligence community. The hire is notable for two reasons: it demonstrates xAI's continued aggressive talent acquisition even as multiple co-founders have departed the company, and it represents a successful poach from Murati's nascent lab.
Chaplot's expertise in embodied AI and agentic systems could signal xAI's ambitions beyond conversational AI toward more autonomous AI systems. His move also highlights the increasingly competitive dynamics between AI labs, where even well-funded startups led by industry luminaries are vulnerable to talent raids.
