Is this satire? Stack Overflow is infamous for how hostile its culture is towards people asking questions. And I'm sure that the CEO is well aware of that. The fact that they're dropping a quote like this one into the post without a single word even attempting to address SO's well-known culture problems is a slap in the face to anyone familiar with the platform.
https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion...
Why SO thinks this is the biggest problem they should be solving, or why it took four years to roll out, is beyond me; for one, I can't ever recall discussing or caring about anybody's genitals or lack thereof when posting coding Q&As.
What does it actually mean? Yeah, probably nothing. In fact as others say it might ironically actually not be true (an 'unsafe place', 'hostile to newcomers') in SO's case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16934942
I don't think any CEO or PR department would willingly admit such things...
“ Since my last quarterly update, companies across nearly every sector have experienced significant transformation—whether it’s a more aggressive focus on profitability or a shift in product strategy due to the acceleration of generative AI (GenAI). Thematically, however, one thing has remained the same: companies are committed to driving productivity and efficiency throughout their organizations. At Stack Overflow, we continue to help our customers and community deliver both.”
The unclear and muddy writing reveals that their thinking is likewise unclear.
Generalities instead of specifics. Vague platitudes. This is poor writing.
StackExchange is facing an existential threat and there is nothing in this letter that names it, identifies steps they’ll take to address, or how they will thrive in the new future.
It is not unexpected, but a confirmation of what we all might fear.
I guarantee nobody at the company dares to critique this guy’s writing like you did. His sycophants at the SVP level nod along, pretending the emperor has clothes, and that they all understand what to do now, as they share similar, vague thoughts with their own teams.
By changing the community guidelines to prohibit such behavior, and then aggressively banning users who engage in it.
Of all the problems Stack Overflow faces, this one would be the easiest to solve, but the people who run the site have made it abundantly clear long ago that they just don't give a fuck.
No, just companies built on user generated data which in turn is used to train the models that will replace them.
Otherwise we will all just speak gobblygook nodding along while our tools do the job for us. Not my personal signage
This means companies like stack overflow will require licensing and compensation for AI corporations to use new data - it won't be free anymore.
Data hoarding is the future, not open data sharing (because everyone will fear being replaced). We will see a more closed future behind paywalls. It will be very expensive for subsequent versions of ChatGPT etc. to be trained with up to date knowledge outside of Wikipedia etc.
Well StackExchange seems pretty poorly positioned then because their data is under the Creative Commons.
(Although notably, I only spend time writing answers on StackExchange because I feel like I'm contributing to an open corpus of knowledge; the license is a major part of that.)
I think StackOverflow could do something like that; have a bot account owned by StackOverflow that would respond to posts.
Here is the example I made: https://doc.nstr.no/bitcoin_background
Here for example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Arch-Linux
I think they are digging their own grave with this. Their only advantage is all the SEO work they did to show up in google searches.
Imagine if every SO question automatically had a ChatGPT-generated answer applied to it, but in wiki fashion, so it could be modified to remove errors, add additional context, point out hallucinations etc.
At the same time, humans could still answer too, providing alternative/better solutions, which ultimately are fed back into ChatGPT.
Maybe SO should just acquihire Phind. Use Phind as the gatekeep to filter out questions with well established answers before another doe-eyed user make the fatal mistake of asking a non well-formed question before they are excoriated by the poweruser #44956.
If the free humam labor solving diverse coding problems in public repositories stops, any such trained LLM solution will gradually degrade, e.g it will have no material around new libraries, new languages etc.
I'm not so sure about this.
Firstly, ChatGPT seems to hallucinate quite a lot, which can result in me wasting a lot of time, especially when the hallucinations aren't immediately apparent.
Secondly, presumably the content of Stackoverflow had been used to train ChatGPT... so if Stackoverflow and all of it's human-generated content disappeared, to be replaced by AI-generated content, that could be a bad thing for ChatGPT in the long run.
How exactly are you planning on investing that back into the community? It sounds like it just wants to be YOU who captures the value of 15 years of community investment. It's fine, SO is a business, and people agreed to the TOS, but this is laughably blatant bs.
Laying off 10% of the company after putting another 10% of the company on developing AI-anything do look more like panic to me. AI-generated content is threatening one half of their business model, and additionally causing moderation issues as well on the public sites.
Stackoverflow hardly surfaces when I am searching for help and when I find answers it's usually a blog or a hosted blog somewhere. Most Stackoverflow answers are usually 4-5 years old and outdated.
Perhaps it's simply my engineering has improved in the last decade and I no longer search for help very often and when I do it's outside the scope of Stackoverflow..
You get answers to unanswered posts with 0 replys that are useful that way
Stack Overflow is doomed
With tools that allow you to download pre-trained models and run them on premises, I start to doubt the future of SO for Teams.
