Elon Musk: XAI Is Calling Its Employees Engineers, Not Researchers

Elon Musk says he has banished the job title “researcher” from his AI startup, xAI.

The excellence between researcher and engineer is a “thinly masked approach of describing a two-tier engineering system,” Musk wrote in an X put up on Tuesday.

“There are solely engineers,” Musk mentioned.”Researcher is a relic time period from academia.”

Musk then drew a comparability to his rocket firm, SpaceX, which he mentioned did extra “significant, cutting-edge” analysis on rockets and satellites than “all the tutorial college labs on earth mixed.”

“However we do not use the pretentious, low-accountability time period ‘researcher,'” Musk mentioned.

xAI didn’t reply to requests for remark from Enterprise Insider.

OpenAI, which Musk co-founded with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2015, makes use of an identical naming method for its technical hires.

Brockman, the president of OpenAI, wrote in an X put up in February 2023 that they didn’t wish to “bucket folks into researchers and engineers” and “thought onerous about what job titles to make use of.” OpenAI later determined to make use of the time period “Member of Technical Employees.”

Brockman mentioned the time period was first utilized by Xerox PARC, a analysis laboratory recognized for its pioneering improvements, such because the mouse and the graphical person interface used on computer systems.

Anthropic, an organization based by former OpenAI workers, mentioned on its web site that its “analysis and engineering hires all share a single title — ‘Member of Technical Employees.'” The corporate mentioned it listed its engineers as authors on their analysis papers, “typically as first writer.”

“Whereas there’s traditionally been a division between engineering and analysis in machine studying, we predict that boundary has dissolved with the appearance of enormous fashions,” Anthropic wrote on its profession web page.