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Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?
- christkv 6mo ago[flagged]
- whatever1 6mo agoThis is about the $10/hour that they give to freelancers to solve math/physics/chemistry problems so that they can train the LLMs on them. I get approached by “recruiters” all the time about this.
- kloop 6mo agoTo be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options Every time one of these articles come up, you can recognize that silicon valley is treating these people badly, but you should remember that everyone else is treating them worse
- j45 6mo agoDoesn’t make it ok. I do wonder how minor this foundation has been laid w where graduate students may be conditioned exploited by colleges.
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoAcademia already has a well-established structure of exploitation, with menial work falling down on grads and some undergrads, while credit for it being captured higher up in the tree.
- j45 6mo agoSome institutions after all were created, for establishment and preservation of a privileged class.
- whatever1 6mo ago> To be blunt, those freelancers wouldn't be doing this if they had better options Correct, this is what the article points out. Their options were squashed when SV was praising DOGE and the cuts to national research grants based on keywords like “inequalities”. Nobody had the time to check that mathematicians also use the term. We wrecked our research and the vultures got cheap labor to put lipstick on their slop machines.
- philwelch 6mo agoThe problem is much older than that. Academia didn’t start overproducing PhD’s and exploiting grad students and adjuncts in 2025.
- alex43578 6mo agoYes, it’s much better to spend “$400,000 for a Research Project on Whether Ducks Enjoy Classical Music”, just to ensure not a single grant went unfulfilled. We have a $1.78T deficit. The ducks and the mathematicians will need to take a cut at this point.
- rrr_oh_man 6mo ago> We have a $1.78T deficit The fatal assumptions many people thinking about government spending from the outside make are that a) money is limited and b) money is redistributed (~to a cause of their choice) after funding for something else gets cut
- alex43578 6mo agoMoney isn’t limited, as in we can just print more, but it comes at an inflationary cost: see the last 5 years. MMT doesn’t work. Since money is limited, and we’re spending in a deficit, money shouldn’t be redistributed to another bad cause after something gets cut. Unfortunately, and all too often, it does. One side cuts taxes to spend on blowing up the world’s energy market, another side raises taxes to buy votes among the people who pay 0 in taxes (or fund a study on if ducks like Mozart). They’re both wrong, and people are too blinded by the sports-team nature of politics to recognize this.
- TeMPOraL 6mo agoAlso if they're solving problems to help LLM training in their domain, that's actually pretty useful contribution to science - and definitely more directly useful than the work that dominates actual research, i.e. chasing grants instead of researching.
- trevithick 6mo agoStill bad for the scientists. They get little money and zero recognition.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago"that's actually pretty useful contribution to science" Why? Serious question. Surely the only people using the LLM for such specific STEM domains are the exact same people who are "chasing grants instead of researching." Certainly I can see how training an LLM on this stuff can help automate the process of grant-chasing, and maybe OpenAI can expand their homework cheating business to graduate schools. But I do not see how this stuff helps honest researchers, except a bit around the margins (e.g. perhaps Claude isn't so good at the Perl used in bioinformatics, that's a use case justifying some RLHF from a PhD). It really seems like the main utility of this stuff is getting a higher score on Humanity's Last Exam and showing the customers/investors that actually Opus 4.9 is 2% smarter than GPT 5.5. Separately there are AlphaProof/etc-style LLMs for solving real research problems in math and CS, but those techniques don't even work for theoretical physics, let alone biology.
- TeMPOraL 6mo ago
- LeCompteSftware 6mo agoThat shouldn't be viewed in isolation. A major root cause is essentially overproduction of academics downstream from the Cold War, and obviously the private sector is not to blame for that. But you can't ignore how much modern Big Tech has sucked away from academia compared to the tech companies of the Cold War era. Microsoft Research and Google Research have some impressive folks, but even combined they are a scientific pittance compared to the might of Bell Labs, and there is far more interference from the business side. This despite the fact that the executives of those companies are vastly wealthier than anyone from Bell Labs in the 20th century, even adjusting for inflation. And of course it's not just the executives: every 7-figure Google software engineer should get a >$100k pay cut, and that money goes to a STEM PhD to pursue nonprofit research at Google Labs. Believe it or not, $100k is still pretty competitive for a young PhD mathematician (similar to assistant professor at a selective state school). Even if it's chump change for a guy who fine tunes AdSense.
- danaris 6mo agoDescribing it as "overproduction of academics" is kind of begging the question, though: is it not at least as much "deprioritization of basic research and education"? It's not like the current demand for scientists is somehow a completely natural value, arrived at objectively and with no human biases involved. And the private sector is heavily to blame for that. In ways that you even describe, as well as others (as another commenter noted, regulatory capture is one).
- amirhirsch 6mo agoPeter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” suggests this is a cause for social instability and revolutions
- svnt 6mo agoThis assumes regulatory capture is not a thing.
- jbxntuehineoh 6mo agoSomeone: it is bad that people are being treated poorly. We should effect changes such that they are no longer treated poorly. Resident libertarian moron: uuuuhhhhhh have you considered that they voluntarily consented to being treated poorly? Actually this is the least poorly they could possibly be treated.
- amazingamazing 6mo agoI’m curious what you are proposing exactly. I see articles even from year 2000 about PhD lifestyles being terrible during and after school.
- philwelch 6mo agoHow does that compare to adjunct pay?
- xienze 6mo ago> This is about the $10/hour that they give to freelancers to solve math/physics/chemistry problems so that they can train the LLMs on them. If you're talking about DataAnnotation, specialized stuff like that is $30/hour and up.
- p_j_w 6mo agoIt seems pretty obvious that GP wasn’t saying $10/hr to mean literally $10/hr, but were exaggerating to imply that people were getting chump change for this work. $30/hr is still chump change and not enough to buy oneself any reasonable quality of life for the majority of the population.
- xienze 6mo agoWell, it's something. PhD students have always been pretty poorly paid because there's a massive oversupply of them. At least they have an additional source of income available to them.
- elgertam 6mo agoMath, physics, and chemistry RLHF freelancing is typically north of $40/hr. Even competence at simply reading & writing English prose earns at least $20/hr. I've never seen an offer for less than that, and I lived off of that kind of work for a month after a layoff in 2024. That seems like a fair trade considering the freelancer takes on none of the risk and has very little required capital.
- tclancy 6mo agoHow many people do you think you are describing? >A university that owns the IP output of PhD students is probably as bad a villain in this history In the battle of Peter Thiel (or Marc Anddrressenn) vs Your Strawman, I'm putting my newly-minted rugpull coins on the guy who thinks he's Tech Jesus.
- inquist 6mo agoToo many ads, did not read
- kspacewalk2 6mo agoInvest in an ad blocker or Firefox with 'reader view'.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- redwood 6mo agoI think it cuts both ways because these types of people are the ones who can wield this technology as a Swiss army knife to do really interesting things and in fact if they can build on top of their own peers' collective toil then they can avoid doing that toil themselves and potentially do greater things.. at least that's the theory. If some of them want to temporarily participate in the toil, nothing wrong with that, after all that's what doing a PhD is anyway. Same goes with homework and problem sets earlier in the science trajectory. The greater fear that we won't need these types of experts b/c in the future machines will have all the intelligence or the ratio of humans with expertise to the overall population will somehow drift is certainly a societal level concern as we offload intelligence to the machines but the flip side of it is that will not be able to learn how to higher level of abstraction or more quickly than ever before enabling more of us to actually develop expertise, or at least a new type of expertise. Not that Star Trek is meant to be real but when I think about the crew of the Starship Enterprise I imagine few of them actually know all of the ins and outs of how the warp drive work but they're able to travel around with star system
- Telemakhos 6mo agoStar Trek's warp-capable space ship is a fictional analogy for nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, which are designed by geniuses to be used and maintained at sea by people who are not geniuses and who do not understand all the ins and outs of how atomic energy works. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people today using computers without understanding how transistors work or which register they're writing to at any given moment. Many of these people also drive cars without understanding how gears can shift or how the radial motion of the main drive shaft gets transferred in the transverse direction to the drive axle. I suppose a few of them wear clothes without having ever sheared a sheep and without knowledge of the best way to felt wool.
- LtWorf 6mo agoYou've ever seen a star trek episode? (The real ones, not the modern crap). Even the guy pushing the button for the teleporter is some kind of technical genius.
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- WhitneyLand 6mo agoIn case you wonder where the current trends come from. “Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.” Most troublingly, Andreessen called for the National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.””
- mc32 6mo agoBureaucracy and momentum can lead to rot. It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection. Companies tend to have restructurings and stack ranking. Obviously these have their downsides too. But they also serve to shake things up and reassess direction and needs. If you’re swimming in money often you can skip this till you hit the skids.
- Ar-Curunir 6mo agoFor that to work you need someone with good intentions doing the rebuilding. Fascists like thiel and andreesen don’t have good intentions.
- LtWorf 6mo agohttps://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federal-916e6819104f04f44c345b7dde4904d5 https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federa...
- superxpro12 6mo agoI summarily reject any notion that our "universities" are broken. This claim has been parroted around for the better part of a decade now. IT is an obvious right wing think tank target. Sprinkle in some heritage foundation too. The reality is, these universities were independent institutions that did their jobs to teach without bias. Only when fox news and right wing media captured all the news sources did "universities" suddenly become "liberal thinktanks". Our science and research institutions arent broken. It never was. It's under attack by right wing propaganda to "bring them in line".
- glitchc 6mo agoThe problem is really one of supply and demand. Whatever SV talking heads say is a post-hoc rationalization on top of this basic fact. We have too many PhDs (I say this as one). It's never been easier to get one. Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Unfortunately, with credential inflation, this cycle will escalate. Soon people will complete two just to qualify for an academic position.
- lapcat 6mo ago> Most PhD topics are incremental and derivative whereas they should be seminal and ground-breaking. Why? Most science is incremental. And there's nothing wrong with that.
- zdw 6mo agoThis is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed. Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster CPU or a new clanker model. I think there's this group of folks who are like "Why don't we have flying cars?" and eventually realize the problem is physics, but have to somehow blame people instead.
- glitchc 6mo ago> This is exactly the problem - early on there was a lot of "low hanging fruit" in science - entire new areas where our tools and capabilities for discovery and analysis got way better very quickly. Think of everything that better telescopes, scanning electron microscopy, and computerization allowed. This trope gets repeated every so often but it's just a trope. In 1900s people felt all physics was solved, then came relativity and the photoelectric effect. In the 1940s, after the second world war, atomics was the ultimate of physics, then we developed transistors. Until 1950s, sand was basically a worthless resource, and now, good quality silica commands a high price in the global marketplace. Truth is, there are many low-hanging fruit, we cannot even guess what we don't know when we don't know it. I wager that we have barely scratched the surface of what is possible. It's still possible to make ground-breaking innovations. In fact, they come with regularity, along with all the pulp that qualifies as research nowadays. Here's an example from my field: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/hits09/gentry-homomorphic-encryption.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~odonnell/hits09/gentry-homomorphic-e...
- linuxftw 6mo agoEvery time someone goes to a college or university and pays out of their own pocket to learn the skills necessary to work for a corporation, that's society subsidizing the costs of the corporation. We're being robbed. We need to actively shame people that spend massive amounts of money on college.
- Jgrubb 6mo agoI'm sorry, we should shame the people who are following the only tattered script left for trying to make a better life for themselves?
- miltonlost 6mo agoMore education is actually a good thing. We need to shame corporations and the rich for hoarding wealth and not making education cheaper.
- AngryData 6mo agoWe are being robbed, but not by the regular people trying to get educated, but by the politicians and wealthy capitalists that could change educational models to not require paying massive amounts to get educated. 99.5% of what people want or need to learn were discovered by people either retired or long dead, but access to many of those materials and knowledge is held behind a profit seeking toll booth.
- array_key_first 6mo agoI don't understand how we went from "corporations are stealing from us" to "we need to shame random people (who are just trying to improve their lives)"
- fedeb95 6mo agoIronic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible.
- palmotea 6mo ago> Ironic how a libertarian would impose his personal views on "the system". Doesn't work? Let it die. Too many PhDs? Perhaps, let them search for a job. If they're indeed too many, a generation of plumbers etc. will emerge naturally. No one is impeding their businesses, if anything governments worldwide are aiding big technology companies in any way possible. It's not ironic when you understand that libertarianism is really about maximizing personal liberty for an individual, and that often means constraining the liberty of others who would stand in their way. It's the most libertarian thing for millions of people to have very constrained lives under the rule of some wealthy person who gets to do whatever he wants.
- fedeb95 6mo agothat's not true in my opinion. Being a libertarian means first recognizing what "liberty" is. So there are many different libertarians, one for each definition, and then one for each consequence that can be inferred from that definition. If you value liberty as the maximum liberty that doesn't constrain others more than you are constrained, that is, realizing that humanity is both freedom and society, it's a very different thing than using any mean necessary to obtain your own freedom. I understand this isn't the perspective of many that call themselves "libertarian".
- UncleMeat 6mo agoAndreesen and Thiel aren’t libertarians (at least, what libertarians claim to be). They advocate for a system of extreme top level control by CEO-kings.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- SamHenryCliff 6mo ago[dead]
- impostervt 6mo agoHonest question, not really related to the story: What makes someone "exploited"? Most of us trade our time for money, so at what point does the money become too little and be considered exploitative? Are all gig workers exploited? Didn't they make a rational choice that this is the best opportunity for themselves? It certainly feels wrong, the low wages. I'm just wondering where the threshold is.
- swed420 6mo agoCost of living varies by locale and changes over time, so you won't find a single number to answer your question. But it shouldn't be hard to determine what is a comfortable standard of living and what is not for any given time/place.
- tpm 6mo ago> What makes someone "exploited"? According to Marx it's basically always you are selling your time/labor for money because you are paid less than the value of the labor. The employer keeps the surplus.
- gruez 6mo agoIt's probably worth mentioning that Marx's labor theory of value is not taken seriously by mainstream economists.
- AngryData 6mo agoTo be fair economists don't agree on many things and even the most mainstream theories are regularly challenged as inadequate and ineffective at explaining past and current economic trends and bad at guiding policy changes and decisions.
- philwelch 6mo agoThere is a very broad consensus that labor theory of value is nonsense however. And when it comes to a theory being “bad at guiding policy changes and decisions”, attempts to implement Marxism killed more people than the world wars, many through famine.
- Tangurena2 6mo agoArchive link: https://archive.ph/IbdD4 https://archive.ph/IbdD4
- nunez 6mo agoWell, my wife, a math teacher with an advanced math degree, has been seeing data classification/labeling jobs for people with advanced math degrees. They pay well (USD$60/hr), but are, of course, contract work. There are similar jobs for people with law degrees. So, yeah, STEM/white-collar is definitely getting a bit gig-ified.