- Published on July 31, 2025
- In Global Tech
Why OpenAI Calls Everyone a ‘Member of Technical Staff’
Has the ‘researcher’ turned into an ‘engineer’ in the AI workspace?
Image by Nalini Nirad
- By Siddharth Jindal
In today’s AI labs, the distinction between an engineer and a researcher is gradually blurring. The title does not matter as much as the work. Writing code, exploring data, building something new. At places like OpenAI, these labels are being left behind.
Elon Musk has now challenged the divide publicly. “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,” he wrote in a recent post on X.
He was responding to one of his own engineers, who was hiring for researchers and engineers at xAI.
Musk argued that SpaceX does more meaningful, cutting-edge research in rocketry an
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Siddharth Jindal
Siddharth is a media graduate who loves to explore tech through journalism and putting forward ideas worth pondering about in the era of artificial intelligence.
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