Three Indian-origin engineers were elevated to leadership roles as Elon Musk plans an overhaul of the engineering team of xAI, according to a new report. The alleged changes come at a time when xAI is merging more closely with SpaceX ahead of the rocket company’s mega IPO (initial public offering).
According to the report by Business Insider citing an internal company memo, SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls said the company was “clearly behind” its peers and was taking action to reach their level as quickly as possible.
Three Indian-origin engineers to lead key teams
Devendra Chaplot, who joined last month, will lead pre-training, where he will oversee the initial phase in which an AI model learns general patterns from massive datasets including text, images and code, as per Business Insider. The new leader of the team is a former researcher at Facebook and Thinking Machines Labs.
Meanwhile, the model factory and tooling department will be led by Indian-origin engineer Aman Madaan, who will oversee the infrastructure, data pipelines, and training workflows used to develop and improve .
Aditya Gupta will be responsible for post-training and reinforcement learning. This is the final stage where an AI model is fine-tuned, aligned with human preferences, and optimised for real-world use scenarios like chatting or coding assistance.
Michael Nicholls elevated
SpaceX executive Michael Nicholls, who is a senior vice president of Starlink at the space company, will now also be the president of xAI, Business Insider reported citing one person familiar with the knowledge of the matter.
acquired xAI earlier this year and is on its way to conduct an initial public offering this year, as per multiple media reports. However, over the past few months, xAI lost several cofounders and senior leaders and went through a number of organisational changes as it also raced to keep up with AI rivals OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
Now, xAI founder Elon Musk is implementing his “Tesla playbook” to rebuild the company from its roots.
Changes in xAI product and infrastructure team
Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsburg, who joined xAI in March after their stints at AI coding giant Cursor, have also seen their roles being elevated. The duo will lead the company’s product team, which oversees Grok Main, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine.
Jake Palmer will lead physical infrastructure, while compute infrastructure will be overseen by Daniel Dueri, who is the director of software engineering at SpaceX, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Other SpaceX employees have also taken leadership roles at xAI. This includes Matt Monson, the director of Starlink software at SpaceX, who will now also lead data at xAI.
As per the memo viewed by Business Insider, Nicholls said the training performance of xAI’s compute is “embarrassingly low,” with the company planning to improve the same significantly over the next two months.
The changes to the roles are effective immediately, Nicholls said in the alleged memo, adding that the company was working to give its employees titles that better describe their roles.
In February, Elon Musk reorganised xAI and unveiled a new internal structure. Tesla and SpaceX engineers have also come into the company’s Palo Alto office to assist with the changes as eight out of 11 xAI cofounders left the company ahead of the IPO, as per the report by Business Insider citing people familiar with the development.