“Stop calling them labs” by sawyer🔸

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 [...]

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
February 24th, 2025

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Ap6E2aEFGiHWf5v5x/stop-calling-them-labs

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.