Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, doesn’t agree with Elon Musk’s latest take on AI development. Like, at all.
Musk sparked a conversation about the roles of researchers and engineers at tech companies on Tuesday in an X post. Musk said his AI startup, xAI, would ditch the “researcher” job title in favor of “engineer.”
“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 said. “There are only engineers. Researcher is a relic term from academia.”
Two days later, LeCun shared a screenshot of Musk’s X post on LinkedIn with a multi-paragraph response.
“If you make no distinction between the two activities, if you don’t evaluate researchers and engineers with different criteria, you run the risk of killing breakthrough innovation,” LeCun said. “True breakthroughs require teams with a long horizon and minimal constraints from product development and management.”
Musk isn’t the first person to question the distinction between AI researchers and engineers. Other leading AI companies have, too.
In a 2023 X post, OpenAI President Greg Brockman said that the company didn’t want to put its workers into such defined buckets. Instead, the ChatGPT-maker settled on the phrase “Member of Technical Staff.”
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Anthropic, which makes Claude, also uses “Member of Technical Staff” as a job title.
“While there’s historically been a division between engineering and research in machine learning, we think that boundary has dissolved with the advent of large models,” Anthropic says on its careers page.
LeCun, however, says the research labs that shaped what the science and tech industries have become were all separate from engineering divisions.
“The industry research labs of yore that have left an indelible mark on scientific and technological progress (Bell Labs Area 11, IBM Research, Xerox PARC, etc) were all research divisions that were clearly separate from engineering divisions,” LeCun said.
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