You don't have to tell them “labs”

I’d love to know the ety­mo­log­ical flow that led to the fron­tier AI com­pa­nies being called “labs”. It’s a great twist, ele­vating their work while also pro­jecting a kind of innocence. At one point, DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic each really was a lab, but all three have plainly grown into normal com­pa­nies — DeepMind in its assump­tion of Google’s AI ambitions, OpenAI and Anthropic in their break­neck commercialization.

“Lab” evokes Bell Labs, of course; it evokes deep science, Nobel Prize-level horsepower, a cer­tain purity. I don’t deny that there are labs inside these com­pa­nies … although I don’t believe any of them are oper­ating with any­where near the dis­tance from prac­ti­cality that Bell Labs maintained. And, either way, when you are hiring “Growth Account Executives”, you are a company.

Of course, for pur­poses of posi­tioning and marketing, not to men­tion recruiting, com­pa­nies are free to call them­selves what­ever they like. But there’s no reason for anyone else to col­lab­o­rate with that project — not if it’s clarity we’re after. They are just com­pa­nies.

(Okay, I’ll acknowl­edge that the mys­te­rious SSI might indeed just be a lab!)