They are Devendra Chaplot, ex-Meta/Thinking Machines Lab, leads pre-training efforts (large-scale datasets for text/images/code), Aman Madaan, who oversees the “model factory” (infrastructure, data pipelines, training workflows and Aditya Gupta, handles post-training and reinforcement learning (model refinement).

SpaceX executive Michael Nicolls took a larger guiding role. The move follows co-founder exits and internal assessments highlighting weaknesses versus OpenAI/Anthropic/Google.