Andrej Karpathy’s arrival at Anthropic under the flat “Member of Technical Staff” (MTS) title sparked a broader industry conversation on May 24 about whether the traditional split between Research Scientist, Research Engineer, and Software Engineer still makes sense. Yi Tay (@agihippo) argued the distinction has become meaningless and that a single MTS or RS/RE track is “probably the way to go in this new AI world.” Karpathy himself replied to a related thread calling Anthropic’s approach “refreshing” — crediting the company for cutting through title complexity with one unified group on a shared mission.
Sentiment in the 128-comment thread ran roughly 72% negative, with critics calling the flat title either corporate rebranding, a form of ego softening, or an overcorrection that obscures real differences between deployment and research roles. Supporters countered that Anthropic’s model correctly reflects the reality that research and engineering have converged in modern AI development. Dzmitry Bahdanau pushed back against title skeptics entirely, calling MTS “the best job in the history of humanity.” The thread also surfaced a recurring joke: the “Applied Scientist” title abbreviates to “AS,” leading to at least one memorable Slack introduction of “Senior AS.”