Elon Musk corrects ‘hiring post’ of xAI’s Aditya Gupta; says: Starting today,… there are only engineers …

Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI is eliminating the job title “researcher” and exclusively use “engineer” for all technical staff, following a public correction of an employee’s hiring post on X.The move came after xAI employee Aditya Gupta posted a job listing seeking “researchers and engineers for scaling up our RL environments with user feedback and preference in the loop.” Musk responded directly, declaring the terminology change effective immediately.

AI companies are abandoning traditional academic titles

“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 wrote on X. “There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia.”Gupta quickly issued a correction, posting: “correction: looking for solid engineers.”Musk defended the decision by comparing xAI to SpaceX, stating: “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’. Engineer.”The approach aligns xAI with other major AI companies. OpenAI uses “Member of Technical Staff” for all technical hires, with president Greg Brockman explaining in 2023 that they didn’t want to “bucket people into researchers and engineers.”Similarly, Anthropic employs the single “Member of Technical Staff” title, stating on its website that engineers are “often first author” on research papers and that “the boundary has dissolved with the advent of large models.”