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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. I get approached by
by whatever1 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.
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.
- werrett 6mo agoYes, let’s pay down the deficit by cutting funding to the sciences. While the latest war is running at ~1 billion a day (we’re in day 48 btw). https://iran-cost-ticker.com/ https://iran-cost-ticker.com/
- 6mo ago
- 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.