Genuinely asking because I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Like, OpenAI calls itself a research lab. So does Google DeepMind. So do a bunch of much smaller orgs doing actual frontier research with no products at all. And so do many institutes operating out of universities. Are these all the same thing? Because, to use an analogy, it feels like calling both a university biology department and Pfizer "research organizations." This is technically true but kind of useless as a category.
My working definition has started to be something like: a real AI research lab is primarily organized around pushing the boundaries of what's possible, not around shipping products for mass markets. The moment your research agenda is downstream of your product roadmap, you're a tech company with an R&D team, which is fine! But it's different.
Curious where people draw the line. Is there a lab you'd defend as still genuinely research-first despite being well-known?
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