Elon Musk says researchers are pretentious, there are only engineers at xAI and SpaceX

India Today

4 days ago

Elon Musk's xAI is hiring engineers to join; however, researchers have no place in the team. In a recent X, aka Twitter post, Musk defined his understanding of engineers and researchers. Responding to a job opening posted by a technical member at xAI, he says "researcher" is an ancient term which should not be in his company's dictionary. He added that from this day onwards, there are only engineers at xAI. advertisementHe stated, "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. There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia."
Soon after Musk's correction, the employee, Aditya Gupta, again took to X and posted, "correction: looking for solid engineers." About the job, the employee posted that xAI is looking for researchers and engineers to scale up the "rl environment with user feedback and preference in the loop."
But xAI is not the only organisation to remove "researchers" from its dictionary; SpaceX (also owned by Elon Musk) will also follow suit. Musk stated that while SpaceX works on cutting-edge research on the advancement of rockets and satellites, "but we (still) don't use the pretentious, low-accountabiity term "researcher"."
According to Musk, Engineer is the correct word for employees who work with xAI and SpaceX. But this is not the first time Musk has highlighted the difference between these two terms. OpenAI, cofounded in 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, has also taken an unconventional approach to job titles for its technical teams, borrowing inspiration from the past. In a post on X back in February 2023, Brockman explained that the company wanted to move away from traditional labels like 'researcher' and 'engineer', saying they had 'spent a lot of time thinking about how to describe these roles' before settling on the designation 'Member of Technical Staff'. The title itself has a legacy: it was first used at Xerox PARC, the celebrated research lab credited with inventions such as the computer mouse and the graphical user interface.advertisementThe idea has since caught on. Anthropic, the AI startup founded by exOpenAI employees, has adopted the same structure. On its website, the company explains that all its scientists and engineers share the single title of 'Member of Technical Staff', and that its engineers are frequently credited as authors on research papers – in many cases taking the lead author position.Anthropic argues that the old distinction between research and engineering in machine learning no longer holds, claiming that with large models 'that line has effectively disappeared'. - Ends