Synopsis
Elon Musk is overhauling xAI and, as a part of that, has appointed three Indian-origin engineers—Devendra Chaplot, Aman Madaan, and Aditya Gupta—to key roles in model training and development. The move comes as SpaceX prepares for an IPO and xAI works to improve performance and compete with major AI rivals.The changes come at a time when xAI is working more closely with SpaceX ahead of the rocket company’s planned mega initial public offering (IPO). SpaceX executive Michael Nicolls admitted the company is "clearly behind" its rivals and said steps are now being taken to catch up as quickly as possible.
The Indian rise
Devendra Chaplot, who joined xAI just last month, will now lead pre-training, the early stage where AI models learn general patterns from massive datasets, including text, images, and code, the report said. He previously worked as a researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs.
Aman Madaan will take charge of the model factory and tooling side of things. This includes overseeing the infrastructure, data pipelines, and training workflows that are essential for building and improving AI systems.
Aditya Gupta has been appointed to lead post-training and reinforcement learning. His role focuses on the final stage of development, where models are refined, aligned with human preferences, and optimised for real-world uses such as chat and coding assistance.
SpaceX IPO
SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year and is gearing up for an IPO in the near future. At the same time, xAI has been dealing with a wave of departures among senior staff and cofounders. The most recent exit was Ross Nordeen, who had been one of Musk’s closest deputies.
The company has gone through several internal changes as it tries to keep pace with major AI players such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Other changes in xAI’s teams
Nicolls, who serves as senior vice president of Starlink at SpaceX, has now also taken on the role of xAI president, according to the Business Insider report.
On the product side, Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg will now lead the team after joining from AI coding company Cursor in March. They will oversee key offerings such as Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine.
Jake Palmer will head physical infrastructure, while Daniel Dueri, a director of software engineering at SpaceX, will oversee compute infrastructure, per LinkedIn. In addition, Matt Monson, who leads Starlink software at SpaceX, will now be responsible for data at xAI.
According to Business Insider, in an internal memo, Nicolls said the training performance of xAI’s compute systems is "embarrassingly low" and stressed that the company aims to make improvements within the next two months.
Nicolls added that the changes are effective immediately and that efforts are underway to assign job titles that better reflect what employees actually do.
Back in February, Elon Musk had already reorganised xAI and introduced a new internal structure. Since then, engineers from Tesla and SpaceX have been brought into the company’s Palo Alto office to help with the transition, especially since the 11 cofounders have left the company, the report said.
