Just a few days ago, Elon Musk announced that his AI startup, xAI, would eliminate the job title of “researcher.” Instead, there would now be “only engineers” at the company. He even called the term researcher a relic from academia. “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 (formerly Twitter).

Musk’s announcement came after a post from xAI employee Aditya Gupta, who shared a job listing for “researchers and engineers for scaling up our RL environments with user feedback and preference in the loop.” However, Musk responded directly, declaring the terminology. Now Musk’s stance on removing the term “researchers” has not been settling well with many and has spanked a controversy in the industry about the importance of distinguishing researchers. Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, has even warned that Musk’s decision to remove the term “researchers” could harm long-term innovation.

Sharing the screenshot of Musk’s post, LeCun wrote a lengthy post on LinkedIn and said that if there is no distinction between the two titles, the company might risk killing innovation. “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 wrote.

LeCun believes that both research and engineering serve very different purposes in the tech ecosystem. Research, he explained, is focused on discovering new principles and advancing knowledge, often years before commercial applications emerge. It’s judged by intellectual impact, peer recognition, and long-term influence. Engineering, by contrast, according to LeCun, is about building functional products with short-term impact.

“True breakthroughs require teams with a long horizon and minimal constraints from product development and management,” wrote LeCun. He also pointed to research labs such as Bell Labs, IBM Research, and Xerox PARC, which produced some of the most transformative technologies of the last century, as examples of why maintaining separate research divisions matters.

Meanwhile, Musk is not the only one blurring the lines between research and engineering in Silicon Valley. OpenAI and Anthropic have also dropped traditional job titles, and are now calling for its engineers and researchers “Members of Technical Staff” to highlight the hybrid roles of these employees. These companies argue the distinction is less relevant in the era of large-scale AI models.

However, contrary to them, Meta’s LeCun believes the change could backfire. He warned that without protected research roles, companies risk focusing on incremental improvements rather than fundamental breakthroughs.

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