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 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.””
Musk uses Twitter to keep up appearances and routinely posts UBI propaganda that will obviously never materialize. Why would the guy who slashes social security (except for his corporations) introduce UBI?
The genuine worry is that these people have too much money and do seem unhinged. Thiel promotes the Antichrist and the apocalypse, Musk reposts weird Grok pictures of women as dark angels with wings as well as constant pictures of his mother. Material for a Hitchcock movie.
Both should be under anti-constitutional observation in the EU just like Scientology, which was also inspired by SciFi junk.
He’s been nuts for a while. See naming one of his (many many many) children some keyboard smash nonsense (supposedly the name of some guardian angel because he believes in that)
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.
There certainly is a problem in universities and some of it might be a recent cultural development. It also isn't restricted to US universities either and some of it mirrors the a church that wanted to keep some knowledge under wraps. Publishing is also a perverted circus if you indeed are employed as a scientist and want to publish your work/findings.
That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.
I 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".
Move fast and break things is, in fact, a bad philosophy to work by and govern by. Especially when the people in charge admit to not wanting to rebuild.
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 qualify for an academic position.
Do you think the boundary of science isn't pushed forward incrementally? Not every person can be an Einstein, hell, not every generation has an Einstein. And Einstein couldn't have done what he did for science without the foundation of those "incremental and derivative" advancements.
This nonsense falls apart at the barest inspection. Science IS BORING. And it should be.
Take for example a muscle building study that found that the biceps grew significantly more when tension was maximized in the stretched position. Science based lifting people hawked for years that the "stretch mediated growth" was king. All based on that one "seminal and groundbreaking" research. Years later when a "incremental and derivative" study was done on the hamstrings found no stretch mediated growth effect. Without the boring work, we wouldn't know that some muscles grow faster when tensioned under stress and some don't.
Hell even under your criteria, if the stretch mediated effect wasn't found in the original study you'd probably classified it as incremental and derivative too.
Want another example? How about this one, a scientist was studying which tricep movement produced the most growth. It's obvious right? It's the one that lets you load the most weight onto the triceps, or at least the one that lets you load the most weight onto the most heads of the triceps. Boring. Derivative. Incremental. Except this study found that despite "common sense" it was actually the overhead tricep extension. You can't load it the heaviest, it's mainly targeting just one head of the tricep, it makes absolutely no sense. But science has proven it to be the case. Later "incremental and derivative" research has proposed a theory that since it's overhead, the muscles go slightly hypoxic during the lift and that triggers a stronger growth reaction, and in fact, applying a band for vasoconstriction around the arm and doing bicep curls was found to lead to more bicep growth than doing it without the vasoconstriction. All of this is incremental science. All of this advances our knowledge of how the body grows.
Science is slow. Science is advanced unpredictability. Science is boring.
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.
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.
I 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
Star 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.
Yes a poor PhD that goes to work at OpenAI is truly punished with a 1/2 million salary and stocks. A university that owns the IP output of PhD students is probably as bad a villain in this history.
Math, 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.
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.
Describing 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).
PhD was always a fools errand. There are only so many possible professorships with tenure and the people there never seem to retire because obviously they like being paid that good money and being basically able to do what they want.
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.
To think the only thing we needed to do for science to flourish is provide each scientist with one JASSM. The only thing that can stop bad scientists is a good scientist with an air to ground missile.
Someone: 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.
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.
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.
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 chasing grants.)
It's not 2023 anymore, it's 2026. LLMs are good enough to be useful. They have been for at least a year, and they keep getting better. You need to be living under a rock for the past few years to not notice that.
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 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.””
Classic pulling up the ladder behind you.
Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Yes, Musk as well. DOGE did the firing.
Musk uses Twitter to keep up appearances and routinely posts UBI propaganda that will obviously never materialize. Why would the guy who slashes social security (except for his corporations) introduce UBI?
The genuine worry is that these people have too much money and do seem unhinged. Thiel promotes the Antichrist and the apocalypse, Musk reposts weird Grok pictures of women as dark angels with wings as well as constant pictures of his mother. Material for a Hitchcock movie.
Both should be under anti-constitutional observation in the EU just like Scientology, which was also inspired by SciFi junk.
> Musk
He’s been nuts for a while. See naming one of his (many many many) children some keyboard smash nonsense (supposedly the name of some guardian angel because he believes in that)
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.
There certainly is a problem in universities and some of it might be a recent cultural development. It also isn't restricted to US universities either and some of it mirrors the a church that wanted to keep some knowledge under wraps. Publishing is also a perverted circus if you indeed are employed as a scientist and want to publish your work/findings.
That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.
I 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".
Move fast and break things is, in fact, a bad philosophy to work by and govern by. Especially when the people in charge admit to not wanting to rebuild.
https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federa...
For that to work you need someone with good intentions doing the rebuilding. Fascists like thiel and andreesen don’t have good intentions.
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 qualify for an academic position.
Do you think the boundary of science isn't pushed forward incrementally? Not every person can be an Einstein, hell, not every generation has an Einstein. And Einstein couldn't have done what he did for science without the foundation of those "incremental and derivative" advancements.
This nonsense falls apart at the barest inspection. Science IS BORING. And it should be.
Take for example a muscle building study that found that the biceps grew significantly more when tension was maximized in the stretched position. Science based lifting people hawked for years that the "stretch mediated growth" was king. All based on that one "seminal and groundbreaking" research. Years later when a "incremental and derivative" study was done on the hamstrings found no stretch mediated growth effect. Without the boring work, we wouldn't know that some muscles grow faster when tensioned under stress and some don't.
Hell even under your criteria, if the stretch mediated effect wasn't found in the original study you'd probably classified it as incremental and derivative too.
Want another example? How about this one, a scientist was studying which tricep movement produced the most growth. It's obvious right? It's the one that lets you load the most weight onto the triceps, or at least the one that lets you load the most weight onto the most heads of the triceps. Boring. Derivative. Incremental. Except this study found that despite "common sense" it was actually the overhead tricep extension. You can't load it the heaviest, it's mainly targeting just one head of the tricep, it makes absolutely no sense. But science has proven it to be the case. Later "incremental and derivative" research has proposed a theory that since it's overhead, the muscles go slightly hypoxic during the lift and that triggers a stronger growth reaction, and in fact, applying a band for vasoconstriction around the arm and doing bicep curls was found to lead to more bicep growth than doing it without the vasoconstriction. All of this is incremental science. All of this advances our knowledge of how the body grows.
Science is slow. Science is advanced unpredictability. Science is boring.
I suspect every generation has multiple Einsteins, but they're probably getting killed in war zones or crushed under oligarchy.
> 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.
In a master’s, you learn a lot about a little
In a PhD, you learn everything about nothing
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.
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.
I'm sorry, we should shame the people who are following the only tattered script left for trying to make a better life for themselves?
More education is actually a good thing. We need to shame corporations and the rich for hoarding wealth and not making education cheaper.
I 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
Star 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.
You'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.
Yes a poor PhD that goes to work at OpenAI is truly punished with a 1/2 million salary and stocks. A university that owns the IP output of PhD students is probably as bad a villain in this history.
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.
Math, 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.
> 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.
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.
Describing 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).
Peter Turchin’s theory of “elite overproduction” suggests this is a cause for social instability and revolutions
This assumes regulatory capture is not a thing.
> 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.
The problem is much older than that. Academia didn’t start overproducing PhD’s and exploiting grad students and adjuncts in 2025.
PhD was always a fools errand. There are only so many possible professorships with tenure and the people there never seem to retire because obviously they like being paid that good money and being basically able to do what they want.
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.
Yes, 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/
To think the only thing we needed to do for science to flourish is provide each scientist with one JASSM. The only thing that can stop bad scientists is a good scientist with an air to ground missile.
> 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
Someone: 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.
I’m curious what you are proposing exactly. I see articles even from year 2000 about PhD lifestyles being terrible during and after school.
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.
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.
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 chasing grants.)
It's not 2023 anymore, it's 2026. LLMs are good enough to be useful. They have been for at least a year, and they keep getting better. You need to be living under a rock for the past few years to not notice that.
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.
They already didn’t get money or recognition.
How does that compare to adjunct pay?
How 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.
Too many ads, did not read
Invest in an ad blocker or Firefox with 'reader view'.
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