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Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

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Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#11

Post by TeMPOraL »

j45 wrote: post #7
kloop wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To 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

Doesn’t make it ok. I do wonder how minor this foundation has been laid w where graduate students may be conditioned exploited by colleges.

Academia 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.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#12

Post by trevithick »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #9
kloop wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To 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

Also 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.

Still bad for the scientists. They get little money and zero recognition.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#13

Post by LeCompteSftware »

kloop wrote: post #6
whatever1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To 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

That 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.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#14

Post by philwelch »

whatever1 wrote: post #8
kloop wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To 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

> 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 ma…

The problem is much older than that. Academia didn’t start overproducing PhD’s and exploiting grad students and adjuncts in 2025.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#15

Post by philwelch »

trevithick wrote: post #12
TeMPOraL wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also 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.

Still bad for the scientists. They get little money and zero recognition.

They already didn’t get money or recognition.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#17

Post by alex43578 »

whatever1 wrote: post #8
kloop wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To 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

> 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 ma…

Yes, 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.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#18

Post by svnt »

kloop wrote: post #6
whatever1 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To 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

This assumes regulatory capture is not a thing.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#19

Post by TeMPOraL »

trevithick wrote: post #12
TeMPOraL wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also 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.

Still bad for the scientists. They get little money and zero recognition.

Right. They get to contribute something useful and be paid for it, which is better than nothing, but it's sad that their talent is being wasted.

Re: Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers?

#20

Post by LeCompteSftware »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #9
kloop wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To 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

Also 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.

"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.

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