Elon Musk might be running AI lab in xAI, but it will no longer have any researchers.
Elon Musk has said that xAI will no longer use the term “researchers”, and call them “engineers” instead. X employee Aditya Gupta had today shared a job posting on X for an “AI engineer and researcher — Reasoning post training”. “We at xAI are looking for researchers and engineers for scaling up our RL environments with user feedback and preference in the loop. apply here (or drop me a dm),” he had posted on X.
Musk happened to come across this post, and it seems he wasn’t impressed. “This false nomenclature of “researcher” and “engineer”, which is a thinly-masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system, is being deleted from xAI today,” Musk declared on X. “There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia,” he added.
“SpaceX does more meaningful, cutting-edge “research” on the advancement of rockets and satellites than all the academic university labs on Earth combined. But we don’t use the pretentious, low-accountability term “researcher”. (We say) engineer,” he added.
Immediately after, Aditya Gupta, who’d made the original job post, shared an update. “correction: looking for solid engineers,” he posted.
Elon Musk values engineers highly. He himself has a degree in Physics, but has always got his hands dirty, first with coding at Zip2 and PayPal, and then with mechanical and aeronautics engineering at SpaceX and Tesla. Musk likely feels that the term researcher doesn’t completely capture what he expects employees at xAI to do — he likely wants them to be more hands-on and think like engineers, instead of working in a more academic environment that prioritizes publications, citations and tenure like “researcher” connotes.
Other AI labs have some interesting naming conventions as well. OpenAI had simply chosen to call its employees “Member of Technical Staff”, in part to do away with having too many job titles, and likely also to also prevent competitors from getting to know what exactly someone does at the company. Musk seems to have different reasons for choosing to do away with “researcher” and calling everyone an “engineer” instead. It remains to be seen if this catches on in the AI space, but given how many top AI employees have come into the corporate world straight from academia, doing away with “researcher” in favour of “engineer” could take some getting used to for many.