Elon Musk elevates three Indian-origin engineers at xAI

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI has elevated three Indian-origin engineers, Devendra Chaplot, Aman Madaan and Aditya Gupta to leadership positions.  

The move reflects xAI’s growing alignment with SpaceX as it prepares for a potential initial public offering.

As per a news report, SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls will also serve as President of xAI. According to an internal memo, he said the company was “clearly behind” its peers and needed to act quickly to improve performance.

Under the new structure, Chaplot, who joined xAI last month, will lead pre-training. He will oversee the development of AI models using large-scale datasets spanning text, images, and code. He previously worked as a researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Lab. Madaan will head the model factory and tooling team, managing infrastructure, data pipelines, and training workflows. Meanwhile, Gupta will lead post-training and reinforcement learning efforts, focusing on refining models and aligning them for real-world applications.

Additional leadership changes have been rolled out across teams. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg, who joined xAI in March, will lead the product team responsible for Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine. Jake Palmer will head physical infrastructure, while Daniel Dueri will manage compute infrastructure. Matt Monson, from SpaceX’s Starlink division, will also take on responsibility for data operations at xAI.

The internal memo highlighted that these role changes are effective immediately and are intended to bring greater clarity and accountability across functions.

The restructuring comes amid a broader phase of transition at xAI, marked by the departure of several co-founders and senior leaders. Engineers from Tesla and SpaceX have also been collaborating with the company at its Palo Alto office to support the ongoing transformation.