In AI writing, 'researchers' usually means the people behind a paper, lab, or benchmark: they design experiments, report numbers, and argue for a mechanism (attention, RL, retrieval, a safety intervention) rather than shipping a product. The same word can also mean a research *agent* — a model given tools to search, read, and synthesize — so context matters. Related roles include research engineers, who turn papers into working systems, and alignment researchers, who specifically study whether models do what they were intended to do.