‘Researcher is a relic term’: Elon Musk says there are ‘only engineers ’ at xAI

xAI founder Elon Musk is no longer calling his employees “researchers”. Doing away with this nomenclature, he marked a clear division between “researcher” and “engineer,” calling it a two-tier approach to name a system, commenting on its redundancy.

In a post on Wednesday, Musk said that the distinction was a “thinly masked way of describing a two-tier engineering system,” in an X (formerly Twitter). To emphasise his narrative, he said, “There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia.”