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.
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When more specificity is needed, "frontier AI companies," "generative AI companies," "foundational AI companies," or similar could also be used.
I agree with this - 80,000 Hours made this change about a year ago.
It's also just jargon-y. I call them "AI companies" because people outside the AGI memeplex don't know what an "AI lab" is, and (as you note) if they infer from someone's use of that term that the frontier developers are something besides "AI companies," they'd be wrong!
I expect that "labs" usefully communicates to most of my interlocutors that I'm talking about the companies developing frontier models and not something like Palantir. There's a lot of hype-based incentive for companies to claim to be "AI companies", which creates confusion. (Indeed, I didn't know before I chose Palantir as an example, but of course they're marketing themselves as an AI company.)
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That said, I agree with the consideration in your post. I don't claim which is the bigger consideration, only that they trade off.
I think this is a useful distinction, thanks for raising it. I support terms like, "frontier AI company," "company making frontier AI," and "company making foundation models," all of which help distinguish OpenAI from Palantir. Also it seems pretty likely that within a few years, most companies will be AI companies!? So we'll need new terms. I just don't want that term to be "lab".
Another thing you might be alluding to is that "lab" is less problematic when talking to people within the AI safety community, and more problematic the further out you go. I think that, within a community, the terms of art sort of lose their generic connotations over time, as community members build a dense web of new connotations specific to that meaning. I regret to admit that I'm at the point where the word "lab" without any qualifiers at all makes me think of OpenAI!
But code switching is hard, and if we use these terms internally, we'll also use them externally. Also external people read things that were more intended for internal people, so the language leaks out.
I think "labs" has the connotation of mad scientists and somebody creating something that escapes the lab, so has some "good" connotations for AI safety comms.
Of course, depending on the context and audience.
Interesting point! I'd be OK with people calling them "evil mad scientist labs," but I still think the generic "lab" has more of a positive, harmless connotation than this negative one.
I'd also be more sympathetic to calling them "labs" if (1) we had actual regulations around them or (2) they were government projects. Biosafety and nuclear weapons labs have a healthy reputation for being dangerous and unfriendly, in a way "computer labs" do not. Also, private companies may have biosafety containment labs on premises, and the people working within them are labworkers/scientists, but we call the companies pharmaceutical companies (or "Big Pharma"), not "frontier medicine labs".
Also also if any startup tried to make a nuclear weapons lab they would be shut down immediately and all the founders would be arrested. [citation needed]
Seems testable!
Fwiw, I would have predicted that labs would lead to more positive evaluations overall, including higher evaluations of responsibility and safety. But I don't think people's intuitions are very reliable about such cases.
I agree that the term "AI company" is technically more accurate. However, I also think the term "AI lab" is still useful terminology, as it distinguishes companies that train large foundation models from companies that work in other parts of the AI space, such as companies that primarily build tools, infrastructure, or applications on top of AI models.
I agree that those companies are worth distinguishing. I just think calling them "labs" is a confusing way to do so. If the purpose was only to distinguish them from other AI companies, you could call them "AI bananas" and it would be just as useful. But "AI bananas" is unhelpful and confusing. I think "AI labs" is the same (to a lesser but still important degree).
Unfortunately there's momentum behind the term "AI lab" in a way that is not true for "AI bananas". Also, it is unambiguously true that a major part of what these companies do is scientific experimentation, as one would expect in a laboratory—this makes the analogy to "AI bananas" imperfect.
I agree overall but fwiw I think that for the first few years of Open AI and Deepmind's existence, they were mostly pursuing blue sky research with few obvious nearby commercial applications (e.g. training NNs to play video games). I think a lab was a pretty reasonable term - or at least similarly reasonable to calling say, bell labs a lab.
I completely agree that OpenAI and Deepmind started out as labs and are no longer so.
My point was that I don’t think it was marketing or a historical accident, and it’s actually quite different to the other companies that you named which were all just straightforward revenue generating companies from ~day 1.
Ah! Yes that's a good point and I misinterpreted.That's part of what I meant by "historical accident" but now I think that it was confusing to say "accident" and I should have said something like "hisotrical activities".
I think people like the “labs” language because it makes it easier to work with them and all the reasons you state, which is why I generally say “AI companies”. I do find it hard, however, to make myself understood sometimes in an EA context when I don’t use it.
I imagine that one reason they are referred to as "labs" is because, to some extent, they are seen as creating a new kind of organism. They aren't just creating a product, they are poking and prodding something most do not fully understand.
This is a good point, though we will probably need to discern between several varieties of "AI companies".
"Lab" (currently) means research is happening there (which is correct for the companies you mentioned).
"AI company" right now mostly says someone is doing something that involves AI. If you're building a ChatGPT wrapper you're an "AI company".
So while I do agree with your point that these companies are no longer just labs (as you mentioned), we need to denote that they are companies where major research is happening, in comparison to most companies who are just building products with AI.
Yes, they're all tech companies. But OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind are obviously the core of a cluster of points in objectspace, and it seems reasonable to look for some name for that cluster (with a different discussion being what exactly the cluster that denotes "labs" includes, and whether these points are a part of it).
I agree that they're worth calling out somehow, I just think "lab" is a misleading way to doing so given their current activities. I've made some admittedly-clunky suggestions in other threads here.
Very, very fair point, Sawyer! There's a lot left to be desired in existing AI risk communications--especially to the public/policymakers-- so any refinements are very welcome in my book. Great post!
Good point. Word association is misleading in this case.