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.”
Furthermore, to draw a parallel, he said that his rocket manufacturing company SpaceX “does more actual research than all the labs on Earth – and no one there calls themselves a ‘researcher’. Call it what it is. Engineer.” “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, ‘” he added in a comment.
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. https://t.co/yNZSdVXGhY
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2025
Musk is not alone: Joins renaming league with Open AI, Anthropic
This comes after OpenAI CEO Sam Altman opened up about similar job titles used in their firm. In February 2023, the firm’s President, Brockman, said they did not want to “bucket people into researchers and engineers” and “thought hard about what job titles to use.” Since then, ChatGPT’s parent firm has been using Member of Technical Staff as the official name for employees in the role.
Interestingly, the job title “Member of Technical Staff” was originally popularised by Xerox PARC, the renowned research lab credited with breakthrough inventions like the computer mouse and the graphical user interface that revolutionised personal computing.
Anthropic, a company established by former OpenAI researchers, has adopted this title for all its research and engineering hires. On its website, Anthropic explains that all engineers are acknowledged as authors on the company’s research publications, and frequently even appear as first authors.
Traditionally, the fields of engineering and research in machine learning were seen as separate domains. However, Anthropic argues that the rise of large-scale models has blurred this boundary, making it increasingly natural to treat research and engineering contributions as part of the same collaborative effort, as outlined on its careers page.
