How Silicon Valley Is Turning Scientists Into Exploited Gig Workers
April 14, 2026
Tech elites are enriching themselves by plundering STEM establishments—and providing researchers scraps.
Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist with out government-funded analysis. Foundational applied sciences, together with the semiconductor and the Internet, emerged from Cold War–period navy analysis applications. As graduate college students at Stanford, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin relied on funding from the National Science Foundation to develop the search algorithms that might ultimately turn into Google. The touchscreens and lithium-ion batteries that we now carry round all day had been likewise developed in college labs funded by authorities grants. Even generative AI—incessantly touted because the crowning achievement of the free market, upon which the destiny of the American economic system relies upon—emerged out of a long time of analysis underwritten by the Department of Defense (DOD). Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winner generally known as the Godfather of AI, left his tutorial place within the United States exactly as a result of he wanted to avoid Pentagon contracts. Hinton however turned to the Canadian authorities to assist fund his lab on the University of Toronto, which ultimately produced main AI researchers for OpenAI, Google, and Meta.
Given how a lot Silicon Valley has profited from government-funded analysis through the years, you may count on a certain quantity of reverence for the system. At the very least, even the staunchest techno-libertarian rationalists ought to acknowledge the worth in not killing their golden goose. Yet Silicon Valley elites are on the very coronary heart of the Trump administration’s devastating assault on public science funding—and, not coincidentally, have positioned themselves to revenue off the wreckage. In explicit, conservative enterprise capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their in depth ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In non-public textual content messages leaked to The Washington Post final yr, 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 obtain “the bureaucratic death penalty.”
Thiel has lengthy set his sights on shifting federal analysis {dollars} from universities to non-public trade. In quite a few interviews, Thiel has pointed out that we’ve 100 instances as many science PhDs as we had a century in the past, but the speed of progress is about the identical. The declare itself is doubtful. He presents no clear benchmark by which to measure scientific progress, nor does he think about the chance that science has turn into extra difficult after a century of development. Could or not it’s that extra forms, nevertheless flawed, is required to function a Large Hadron Collider as in comparison with a microscope and Bunsen burner? For Thiel, the reply is a definitive no: “The average PhD is 99% less productive than people were 100 years ago,” he concludes with unwavering confidence. But even he can not ignore the successes of Cold War analysis applications. However a lot it’d ache his libertarian soul, Thiel acknowledges that DARPA—the analysis and growth arm of the DOD—functioned nicely early on, however he has conveniently decided that it was a one-time acceleration that “came at the price of completely corrupting the institutions.”
In any case, the justifications now matter lower than the precise outcomes. Trump entered his second time period with a plan to chop federal science funding and extort distinguished universities with threats of focused finances cuts. The assaults had been orchestrated by Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who beforehand served because the chief of employees to Thiel at his enterprise capital fund. The proposed budget included funding reductions of 40 p.c for the National Institute of Health, 57 p.c for the National Science Foundation, and 24 p.c for NASA.
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Although Congress has since tried to roll again among the cuts, the administration has already inflicted huge injury. Over 10,000 federal employees with STEM PhDs left the federal workforce final yr. University labs have been forced to fireside researchers, cancel research, or simply shut down operations altogether. Some lecturers sought refuge in Europe; others retired early. An unmistakable chill has taken maintain of the scientific institution—one that may linger lengthy after the Trump presidency.
Why would tech billionaires assault a system that made them enormously rich at just about no private price? The most evident rationalization is that a lot of that newly freed-up funding may be redirected to the tech trade. Thiel and Andreessen place start-ups because the treatment to the supposedly bloated, inefficient scientific forms. They solid themselves because the true champions of science, locked in an existential battle towards pencil-pushing charlatans. If Newton had been round right now, the pondering goes, he can be making use of to Y Combinator and ordering swag for his B2B SaaS start-up. This grandiosity is coupled with a powerful sense of paranoia. In a 2025 interview, Andreessen described the Biden administration as being preoccupied with “the raw application of the power of the administrative state, the raw application of regulation, and then the raw arbitrary enforcement and promulgation of regulation,” concluding: “Absolutely tried to kill us.”
When Trump took energy, it was their flip to strike again. As science budgets obtained axed, portfolio corporations backed by both Thiel or Andreessen—and sometimes both—acquired billions of {dollars} in federal contracts. The administration rapidly deregulated crypto and threatened to punish states that enacted “onerous and excessive laws” referring to AI. This agenda was spearheaded by Trump’s coverage advisers, together with the billionaire enterprise capitalist David Sacks, who led PayPal alongside Thiel, and Sriram Krishnan, who was beforehand a accomplice at Andreessen’s funding agency.
The assaults on science additionally created a brand new expertise pool for Silicon Valley to take advantage of: newly displaced STEM researchers. Within the AI trade, executives incessantly cite the aim of making fashions which are “PhD-level experts” throughout varied tutorial disciplines. But coaching these fashions requires precise PhD-level specialists to write down related prompts, generate coaching knowledge, and confirm the output. How do you get somebody with a doctoral diploma in physics or math to sit down down and resolve lots of of difficult issues? One method is to rent them, pay a aggressive wage, and supply medical health insurance. Another, maybe much less apparent, strategy is to kill off as lots of the earlier job alternatives as potential, such that extremely credentialed researchers is likely to be enticed to carry out mind-numbing gig work for $30 an hour.
A multibillion-dollar trade emerged for exactly this operate. The two most distinguished corporations, Mercor and ScaleAI, each acquired enterprise funding from Thiel. Those early investments seemingly paid off: Mercor most lately raised funds at a $10 billion valuation, whereas Meta purchased a 49 p.c stake in ScaleAI at a $29 billion valuation. This trade has grown quickly by emulating the playbook Uber and Lyft used to attraction to drivers within the early days of ride-sharing. Their commercials emphasize the pliability and freedom of gig work. Jobless lecturers are proven climbing via the woods, studying books on hammocks, and enjoying sports activities with pals. Their testimonial voiceovers clarify that, regardless that the tutorial job market has no alternatives, gig work permits them to make cash whereas remaining of their subject—even when not fairly how they imagined it. “Finding jobs in academia has always been a struggle,” one contractor notes, explaining that he turned to Mercor after his establishment lower off summer season funding. In an commercial for a competing platform, a Stanford-trained chemist expresses hope that working with AI will open future job alternatives, regardless of the in any other case bleak job marketplace for PhD graduates.
As with the ride-hailing trade, preliminary guarantees of simple cash usually give option to a extra difficult actuality. One doctoral pupil in utilized arithmetic was tasked with fixing tournament-level math issues for roughly $90 per hour. The questions had been difficult, even for somebody along with his experience. Yet the corporate would pay for under two and a half hours of labor per query—and incorrect or incomplete responses acquired no compensation in any respect. This meant he confronted a alternative: both proceed engaged on difficult issues totally free, or surrender and forfeit any cost. Other researchers reported comparable experiences throughout gig platforms. A current PhD graduate of an MIT engineering program recalled tabulating all of her unpaid hours for a venture, solely to understand the efficient hourly fee was significantly decrease than what had been marketed. “I originally thought that was [a] very fair, generous amount,” she defined, “but then I started keeping track of all the unlogged hours that I wasn’t really paid for and so it ended up not being super worth it.”
Silicon Valley libertarians may reply that that is merely the free market at work. After all, nobody coerced the doctoral college students or underemployed scientists into performing gig work. But this narrative ignores the very direct coverage choices that formed that “free” marketplace for researchers and lecturers. All of the researchers interviewed for this text described turning to gig work as a result of Trump’s federal funding cuts made it a lot tougher to search out alternatives of their subject. The trigger and impact are abundantly clear: The Department of Energy cuts funding so a summer season stipend disappears, or the Trump administration threatens a college and a number of postdoc positions shut. “I would say it’s akin to being farmed,” the doctoral pupil in utilized arithmetic stated. He described the advertisements for AI gig work as “clickbaity,” explaining that, as a grad pupil struggling to search out work amid funding cuts, it’s onerous to withstand a job description that touts distant, versatile, asynchronous work at seemingly excessive hourly charges.
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As it stands, we more and more depend on the altruism of younger individuals who view science as a calling—however that paradigm may be pushed solely thus far earlier than it breaks. Most scientists will not be in it for the cash; the identical can’t be stated of Silicon Valley. Hence, the 23-year-old founding father of Mercor, Brendan Foody, grew to become a paper billionaire in a matter of months by supplying AI labs with, amongst others, PhD researchers scrambling to stay solvent on their lengthy and more and more arduous profession paths. “The wealthiest companies in the world are willing to spend whatever it takes to improve model capabilities, where Mercor is sitting at the forefront and sort of the primary bottleneck,” Foody explained in a current interview. In actuality, the people coaching the fashions are the bottleneck—gig platforms, to their credit score, simply found out easy methods to revenue from them.
The delusion of the free market is commonly used to obscure what are finally worth judgments. Even Peter Thiel’s libertarianism stops wherever Palantir’s pursuits start. Basic science analysis has by no means been significantly worthwhile in its personal proper, however society has benefited enormously from its development. The new cut price struck by Silicon Valley conflates wealth era with progress. It is akin to deciding {that a} tree’s roots now not have to be watered as a result of the fruit comes solely from its branches. The tech trade could endure in the long term, however a number of enterprise capitalists will make extraordinary short-term returns. In the meantime, a era of scientists dangers getting left behind.
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