Elon Musk may have just snubbed researchers and effectively implied that he has no regards for them.
Aditya Gupta, an employee of X (formerly Twitter), reportedly posted a job opening on the platform for an “AI engineer and researcher — Reasoning post training,” to which Musk promptly replied by declaring that xAI will refer to its employees as “engineers” rather than “researchers” moving forward.
“We at @xai are looking for researchers and engineers for scaling up our rl environments with user feedback and preference in the loop. apply here (or drop me a dm),” Gupta wrote on X.
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After coming across this post, Musk announced on X that “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 added.
“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’,” Musk added in a subsequent comment.
Gupta, who created the initial job posting, released an update immediately and wrote, “correction: looking for solid engineers.”
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Musk founded xAI in March 2023, announcing it publicly in July. The company’s flagship product, Grok, launched in November 2023 and is integrated into X (formerly Twitter), offering real-time responses and a provocative, unfiltered style. By mid-2025, xAI had raised over $16 billion in combined funding, including a $6 billion Series C round and a subsequent $10 billion raise via equity and debt. These funds support its development of the Colossus supercomputer in Memphis, which now operates with around 200,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
Plans for Colossus 2, a next-generation system targeting one million GPUs, are underway and require multi-gigawatt-scale energy. In July, xAI released Grok 4, featuring improved reasoning, coding, and multimodal capabilities. Positioned as a competitor to OpenAI and Google DeepMind, xAI is central to Musk’s broader vision of advancing safe, transparent AI aligned with human values.