Yes and no.

Calling us a lab is not quite right, we are a consulting company.

But hacking is not just limited to in between placements, everybody has (at least) 2 days per month to do that, regardless of any work for customers.

Also, since AI is such a strategically important topic, we have a team that just works on AI stuff internally. That’s where R1T and R1T2 come from.

Sounds like a good use of "spare" time to me and not that different from many a lab I've been part of: someone gets a hunch, sets up an experiment to follow it, proves poor disproves whatever they were after, pulls down the experiment, rinse, repeat.