Elon Musk: For-profit AI companies calling themselves 'labs' is pretentious and harmful Elon Musk shared a post by AI researcher @huaijiangZhu about how 'China's AI lab competitiveness comes from its engineering culture,' and commented that for-profit companies calling themselves 'labs' is both pretentious and harmful. Musk pointed out that some Silicon Valley companies deliberately elevate the status of 'researchers' while treating infrastructure and engineering roles as auxiliary positions, thereby creating a 'lord and serf' hierarchy between researchers and engineers. He emphasized that, in the ideal scenario, both roles should simply be considered engineers.