Sarvam AI has strengthened its ambitions of building frontier artificial intelligence in India by bringing on board one of Silicon Valley\u2019s most accomplished AI researchers. Devendra Singh Chaplot, who previously worked at Elon Musk\u2019s xAI and played founding roles at Mistral AI and Thinking Machines Lab, has joined the Bengaluru-based startup as a part-time advisor.<\/p>\n
The appointment marks a significant addition for Sarvam at a time when global AI companies are fiercely competing for experienced researchers. It also reflects the growing ability of Indian AI startups to attract talent that has helped build some of the world\u2019s most advanced large language models.<\/p>\n
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Chaplot was introduced during Sarvam Epoch 2026 in Bengaluru, where the company also unveiled several new AI products and outlined its long-term roadmap for developing foundation models in India.<\/p>\n
Who is Devendra Singh Chaplot?<\/p>\n
Chaplot\u2019s career spans more than a decade across some of the most influential AI organisations. An IIT Bombay graduate, he earned both his Master\u2019s in Language Technology and PhD in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University before joining leading research teams in the United States.<\/p>\n
He briefly worked at Elon Musk\u2019s xAI earlier this year, joining the company in March before departing the following month, according to his LinkedIn profile.<\/p>\n
Before that, Chaplot served as Tech Lead for Data and Pretraining at Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati. There, he contributed to the company\u2019s Tinker training API.<\/p>\n
His experience also includes serving as a founding researcher at France-based Mistral AI, where he worked on the development of several of the company\u2019s flagship models, including Mistral 7B, Mixtral 8x7B and Mistral Large. He also helped establish Mistral\u2019s Palo Alto office as the startup expanded its presence in the United States.<\/p>\n
Earlier in his career, Chaplot held research positions at Facebook AI Research and completed research stints at Apple and Samsung. His work has covered machine learning, robotics, embodied AI, computer vision, multimodal systems, navigation technologies and large language models.<\/p>\n
His arrival comes as Sarvam establishes a foundational AI research laboratory in San Francisco. Based in nearby Palo Alto, Chaplot will contribute to the startup\u2019s research efforts from its US facility while advising the broader team.<\/p>\n
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At the Sarvam Epoch event, Chaplot said the company would need more than just a handful of experienced researchers to compete globally.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have been part of founding teams at frontier labs. You need a handful of experts and experienced people but we need more of motivated talent, who can catch up very quickly and run the company,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He also argued that India should continue investing in its own foundation models instead of relying entirely on overseas technologies. Pointing to the country\u2019s linguistic and cultural diversity, Chaplot said locally developed AI systems would be better equipped to meet India\u2019s unique requirements.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor India, we have so many languages and cultures. We want to have models that can be customised. This is the reason we absolutely need to build models here,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
While acknowledging that AI models themselves may eventually become outdated, Chaplot stressed that the expertise gained through building them would deliver lasting value.<\/p>\n
\u201cModel is not the goal, it becomes obsolete, but knowing how to build and train your models will outlast everything else,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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His appointment comes at an important stage for Sarvam, which is developing a trillion-parameter foundation model from the ground up. Alongside that effort, the company used its annual event to unveil new versions of its AI offerings, including Saras V4, Bulbul V4 and Vision 2.0, signalling its broader push to establish itself as a global AI player with technology built in India.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sarvam AI has strengthened its ambitions of building frontier artificial intelligence in India by bringing on board one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125627,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[26217,63071,2617,52116,1642,14972,62475,2899],"class_list":["post-125626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-xai","tag-ai-researcher","tag-devendra-singh-chaplot","tag-foundation-models","tag-indian-ai","tag-large-language-models","tag-mistral-ai","tag-sarvam-ai","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125626"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125626\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}