[Elon Musk Criticizes Silicon Valley AI Scene: Researchers Elevated to Nobility, Engineers Reduced to the Bottom] According to monitoring by Beating, Zhu Huaijiang, founding engineer of a robotics startup, believes that Chinese AI teams are consistently producing strong models, and the key may lie in organizational culture, rather than talent or resources being the decisive factors. In his view, organizations like DeepSeek and Kimi are more flatly structured, with no strict division between research and engineering. The same group of people switches between algorithms, data, and training infrastructure, focusing solely on whether the model works. He criticized Silicon Valley for elevating "researchers" to high-status titles while relegating infrastructure work to a supporting role. Engineers have been rebranding themselves as "research engineers," leaving infrastructure tasks to those who couldn't avoid them. However, at the scale of cutting-edge models, infrastructure directly determines the speed of experimentation, which in turn dictates research output. Musk later responded, stating that for-profit companies packaging themselves as "labs" is both pretentious and toxic, while also creating a "nobility and peasantry" hierarchy between researchers and engineers. He remarked that when researchers and engineers perform well, they are essentially all engineers. [Original Link]