We are all increasingly aware of the threat that AI-powered technology poses to jobs across industries. However, Stack Overflow became an instant victim as developers discovered how well ChatGTP could answer questions about their code.
ChatGTP, launched in November 2022, broke adoption rate records. In February we reported that in January he averaged about 13 million unique visitors per day to his ChatGPT website. This is more than double what he did in December. The stats are sourced from Similarweb, which recently revealed continued exponential growth in March, attracting a total of 1.6 billion visits.
Blog post title by David F Carr Stack Overflow Hits ChatGPT: Traffic Down 14% In March to summarize It’s a tough situation, but it’s gotten worse since then, as the following analysis from Similarweb shows.
As access to ChatGPT spread across both free and paid services, we can see that total visits to ChatGPT’s website surged to 1.75 billion in April, an increase of 9.4%. Over the same period, Stack Overflow’s visitor numbers dropped by 18% from he 258 million to he 212.2 million.
Stack Overflow used to be of Go to our site for developers who need help with their code. We are currently facing an AI-powered race, and ChatGPT is the obvious culprit, but according to Similarweb statistics, the decline in visitors to Stack Overflow has already started last year, and its traffic has increased year-on-year. It is reported to have decreased by one year. 6% monthly average from January 2022 onwards.
Before introducing ChatGPT, we already had Copilot on GitHub and coding support from Similarweb.
The GitHub website has also seen strong growth, with traffic to github.com reaching 524 million in March, up 26.4% year-over-year. This doesn’t reflect all of CoPilot’s usage, which typically takes place within an editor such as Visual Studio Code, but it does include users visiting his website to subscribe to the service. It will be.
He also pointed out that visits to the GitHub CoPilot free trial signup page more than tripled from February to March to over 800,000.
The Stack Overflow situation could get even worse as Google’s Bard adds more coding features. When I asked Bard to compare his ChatGTP, he claimed two advantages:
Bard is trained on a dataset containing information from the internet, while ChatGPT is trained on a pre-defined set of data that has not been updated since 2021. This means Bard has access to the latest information, but ChatGPT may have access to more information. That knowledge is limited.
Bard can also access and process real-world information through Google Search, but ChatGPT does not. This gives Bard a wider range of knowledge and allows him to answer questions in a more comprehensive and informative way.
However, Bard also points out that ChatGPT is a more mature product while it is still in development. This means that Bard can be error prone. Bard, on the other hand, is currently free, so it’s likely pulling more traffic from Stack Overflow.
The news that Code Whisperer Amazon’s code assistant is free during its beta is another blow to Stack Overflow, so it may come as a shock, but Stack Overflow has given 10% of its employees (58 employees) The news of layoffs is not a big deal. surprise.
Announcing the announcement in a May 10 blog post, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar wrote:
“Our focus this year has been profitability, which along with macroeconomic pressures has led to today’s changes. As we continue to grow Stack Overflow for Teams, we will strive for agility and flexibility as we launch our AI/ML-focused offering in the coming months. Our commitment is to continue to provide the level of service our customers have come to expect. Public Platforms – knowledge they’ve been seeking from his nearly 15 years of Stack Overflow. ”
In an April blog post, Chandrasekhar acknowledged how much competition he faces from AI writing.
Even before the latest wave of AI arrived, one-third of the code written in popular code repositories was written by AI assistants. Today, sophisticated chatbots built on top of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) can code website functionality based only on rough sketches of photos on napkins. You can answer complex questions about how apps are built, help users debug errors, and translate between different languages and frameworks in minutes. On Stack Overflow, I had to sit down and ask myself some tough questions. What role do we play in the software community when users can ask chatbots for help as easily as anyone else?
To stay relevant, Stack Overflow plans to incorporate generative AI into Stack Overflow for Teams, perhaps by layering a conversational interface on top of the knowledge base. You have to wait for “”.something big about this topic’ Chandrasekhar hinted to find out more.
For more information
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