Note: This started as a quick take, but it got too long so I made it a full post. It's still kind of a rant; a stronger post would include sources and would have gotten feedback from people more knowledgeable than I. But in the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week, I'm writing this in one sitting and smashing that Submit button.
Many people continue to refer to companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind as "frontier AI labs". I think we should drop "labs" entirely when discussing these companies, calling them "AI companies"[1] instead. While these companies may have once been primarily research laboratories, they are no longer so. Continuing to call them labs makes them sound like harmless groups focused on pushing the frontier of human knowledge, when in reality they are profit-seeking corporations focused on building products and capturing value in the marketplace.
Laboratories do not directly publish software products that attract hundreds of millions of users and billions in revenue. Laboratories do not hire armies of lobbyists to control the regulation of their work. Laboratories do not compete for tens of billions in external investments or announce many-billion-dollar capital expenditures in partnership with governments both foreign and domestic.
People call these companies labs due to some combination of marketing and historical accident. To my knowledge no one ever called Facebook, Amazon, Apple, or Netflix "labs", despite each of them employing many researchers and pushing a lot of genuine innovation in many fields of technology.
To be clear, there are labs inside many AI companies, especially the big ones mentioned above. There are groups of researchers doing research at the cutting edge of various fields of knowledge, in AI capabilities, safety, governance, etc. Many individuals (perhaps some readers of this very post!) would be correct in saying they work at a lab inside a frontier AI company. It's just not the case that any of these companies as a whole is best described as a "lab". Some actual AI labs include FAR.AI, Redwood Research, METR, and all academic groups. There might be some for-profit entities that I would call labs, but I'm skeptical by default.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind are tech companies, pure and simple. Each has different goals and approaches, and the private goals of their departments and employees vary widely, but I believe strongly that thinking of them as tech companies rather than AI laboratories provides clarity and will improve the quality of thinking and discussion within this community.
- ^
When more specificity is needed, "frontier AI companies," "generative AI companies," "foundational AI companies," or similar could also be used.
And they are worse than big oil companies and big tobacco companies.