I agree with this - 80,000 Hours made this change about a year ago.

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.)

—

That said, I agree with the consideration in your post. I don't claim which is the bigger consideration, only that they trade off.

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 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.

Elon Musk strongly agrees with this on the Dwarkesh podcast:

Elon Musk
…
I somewhat disagree with the AI companies that are C-corp or B-corp trying to generate profit as much, as possible or revenue as much as possible, saying they’re labs.
They’re not labs. A lab is a sort of quasi-communist thing at universities. They’re corporations. Let me see your incorporation documents. Oh, okay. You’re a B or C-corp or whatever.
…
Dwarkesh Patel

What’s xAI’s plan to stay on the compute ramp up that all the labs are doing right now? The labs are on track to spend over $50-200 billion.

Elon Musk

You mean the corporations? The labs are at universities and they’re moving like a snail.

Dwarkesh Patel

They’re not spending $50 billion.

Elon Musk

You mean the revenue maximizing corporations… that call themselves labs.
…
John Collison

What will xAI’s business be? Is it going to be consumer, enterprise? What’s the mix of those things going to be? Is it going to be similar to other labs—

Elon Musk

You’re saying “labs”. Corporations.

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. 

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.

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 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. 

Good point. Word association is misleading in this case.

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.

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! 

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).

They are big AGI companies.