Elon Musk says he has banished the job title “researcher” from his AI startup, xAI.
The distinction between researcher and engineer is a “thinly masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system,” Musk wrote in an X post on Tuesday.
“There are only engineers,” Musk said.”Researcher is a relic term from academia.”
Musk then drew a comparison to his rocket company, SpaceX, which he said did more “meaningful, cutting-edge” research on rockets and satellites than “all the academic university labs on earth combined.”
“But we don’t use the pretentious, low-accountability term ‘researcher,'” Musk said.
xAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
OpenAI, which Musk co-founded with Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2015, uses a similar naming approach for its technical hires.
Brockman, the president of OpenAI, wrote in an X post in February 2023 that they did not want to “bucket people into researchers and engineers” and “thought hard about what job titles to use.” OpenAI later decided to use the term “Member of Technical Staff.”
Brockman said the term was first used by Xerox PARC, a research laboratory known for its pioneering innovations, such as the mouse and the graphical user interface used on computers.
Anthropic, a company founded by former OpenAI employees, said on its website that its “research and engineering hires all share a single title — ‘Member of Technical Staff.'” The company said it listed its engineers as authors on their research papers, “often as first author.”
“While there’s historically been a division between engineering and research in machine learning, we think that boundary has dissolved with the advent of large models,” Anthropic wrote on its career page.
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