Silicon Valley is turning scientists into exploited gig workers? • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 3:49 PM UTC

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #82

TeMPOraL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are actively used in research all the time, they help with finding and processing existing knowledge, forming and testing hypotheses, analyzing data, writing software, brainstorming, and countless other tasks that form actual research work, as distinct from "grant chasing" and "publishing papers", in which they help, too. (I mean, OpenAI released GPT-Rosalind just yesterday, and - surprise - it's not meant for c…

This doesn't even slightly answer my question. The incredibly frustrating thing about the AI discussion is the refusal to consider actual evidence because of shifting targets. In 2026 there is evidence that 2024 LLMs did enormous damage to scientific research in 2025: hallucinated citations, hallucinated experiements, an onslaught of unreadable prose, etc etc. But we can't talk about that, can we? That's old hat, eve…

LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations - on the contrary, this is only ever a problem for people so clueless and uncaring that they didn't even bother reading what LLMs wrote for them. Hallucinated citations are evidence of fraud or level of uncaring unbecoming a scientist, or any professional on that matter.

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

#92

Post by whatever1 » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 4:42 PM UTC

alex43578 wrote: post #17

whatever1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If the economy still has a pulse today it’s because of math. Literally linear algebra is what drives LLMs.

On the question on music and ducks, music seems something that humans universally get, but it is not clear if animals do so. Why we should not research it? What if music is the secret to human consciousness?

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

#93

Post by zdw » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 5:06 PM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #87

zdw wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Complaining that "Why doesn't progress go fast like before?!" when the newest tool-side improvement is a slightly faster…

> 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…

"physics being solved" feels like it backs the original refinement point - we still use the formulas of Newtonian physics in non-extreme cases, and while those extremes definitely matter in important areas (nuclear power generation, semiconductors), they feel more like exceptional circumstances.

In any case, I agree with the argument for funding more general research because we don't know where the next advance will happen, and even a discovery that only applies in exceptional/narrow cases can have a lot of value.

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

#94

Post by EnPissant » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

WhitneyLand wrote: post #26

In 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 o…

> 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.”

Oh? He vowed what? To make them pay the price? Or did he just predict a cause and effect and The Nation (your source) is libeling him?

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

#95

Post by LeCompteSftware » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #91

LeCompteSftware wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't even slightly answer my question. The incredibly frustrating thing about the AI discussion is the refusal to consider actual evidence because of shifting targets. In 2026 there is evidence that 2024 LLMs did enormous damage to scientific research in 2025: hallucinated citations, hallucinated experiements, an onslaught of unreadable prose, etc etc. But we can't talk about that, can we? That's old hat, eve…

LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations - on the contrary, this is only ever a problem for people so clueless and uncaring that they didn't even bother reading what LLMs wrote for them. Hallucinated citations are evidence of fraud or level of uncaring unbecoming a scientist, or any professional on that matter.

"LLMs couldn't do any damage with hallucinated citations"

If you're saying stuff like this with a straight face then you are clearly not a scientist and you don't know what you're talking about. In 2021 there were maybe 10 papers with fictional citations. Even the publication mills at least linked to other junk papers. Now there are hundreds of thousands of papers with dishonest and useless bibliographies. This is because LLMs are an unbeatable force multiplier for dishonest and useless scientific work.

I am sure some legitimate academics are getting real use out of them. I am also sure that the net effect of LLMs on science is enormously negative, and it will take decades to fix the mess.

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

#96

Post by UncleMeat » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 5:50 PM UTC

fedeb95 wrote: post #55

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.

Andreesen 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.

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

#97

Post by insane_dreamer » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

mc32 wrote: post #33

WhitneyLand wrote: post #26

In 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 o…

Bureaucracy 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.

That's not at all what privatization does. It tears down a system built to benefit the public, and rebuilds a structure designed to profit a small number of individuals instead.

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

#98

Post by jltsiren » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:36 PM UTC

glitchc wrote: post #29

The 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 qu…

Most PhD topics are incremental, because you are supposed to do a PhD very early in your career. Because the American system won and the PhD become the terminal degree. Which you often do as a student rather than even a junior professional.

In my experience, academic researchers are more likely to do significant independent work in their 30s than in their 20s. Some academic cultures have higher doctorates, habilitations, or similar milestones to wrap up this period of peak productivity, but those remain national oddities.

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

#99

Post by AngryData » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

gruez wrote: post #80

tpm wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's probably worth mentioning that Marx's labor theory of value is not taken seriously by mainstream economists.

To 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.

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

#100

Post by AngryData » Fri, Apr 17, 2026, 6:57 PM UTC

linuxftw wrote: post #48

Every 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.

We 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.