Musk Slams Silicon Valley AI Circle: Researchers Elevated to Nobility, Engineers Demoted to Peasantry

According to Seeking Signal monitoring, Machine Intelligence startup founder Zhu Huaijiang believes that Chinese AI teams are continuously producing strong models, with the key possibly lying in organizational culture, talent, and resources not necessarily being the determining factors.

In his view, the organizations of DeepSeek and Kimi are more flat, with research and engineering not strictly separated. The same group of people will switch between algorithms, data, and training infrastructure, only focusing on whether the model can run successfully.

He criticized Silicon Valley for elevating "researchers" to high-status titles while treating infrastructure as auxiliary work. Engineers are eager to upgrade themselves to "research engineers," leaving the infrastructure work to those who couldn't avoid it. However, when it comes to cutting-edge model scales, infrastructure directly determines the speed of experiments, and the speed of experiments in turn determines research output.

Elon Musk then responded, stating that for-profit companies portraying themselves as "labs" are both pretentious and toxic, creating a "nobleman and peasant" style hierarchy between researchers and engineers. He said that when researchers and engineers do well, essentially they are all engineers at heart.