Stack Overflow, a community-driven Q&A site, and OpenAI, a maker of AI models, have agreed to work on improving each other's products. This is the latest in a series of partnerships to feed machine learning models' thirst for data.
The two organizations on Monday characterized the partnership as a way to “power the world's most popular large-scale language model (OpenAI).”
The agreement follows a similar collaboration between Stack Overflow and Google Cloud, which guarantees that Super Labs will receive certain consideration from OpenAI for collecting advice from the Stack Overflow community, allowing developers to It also has the potential to enhance your business prospects. Additionally, these agreements are believed to be established to avoid copyright and other legal troubles with forum super sites.
It's not entirely clear how generative AI will improve the situation for Stack Overflow visitors seeking help. As Pulumi's recent experience with AI Answers shows, not everyone welcomes machine-generated content.
Stack Overflow frowns on generative AI, banning its output from user-submitted posts. And that the ban is invalid can also be inferred from the apology that Stack Overflow contributor “VonC” made four days before his. VonC admitted that he has made approximately 1,850 posts over the past year or so, two-thirds of which he wrote were AI-generated.
“I would like to sincerely apologize that the series of answers I posted on Stack Overflow over the past 13 months were based on output generated (before I reworked, researched, or obtained it) from an AI tool,” VonC said in a statement. “I understand that this action violates his Stack Overflow Community Guidelines, which explicitly prohibit the use of generative AI in post creation.”
Last June, a Stack Overflow moderator explained: register The site claimed to be in crisis as people with programming questions increasingly turned to ChatGPT for answers, negatively impacting visitor traffic, participation, and revenue.
“ChatGPT and GenAI in general pose a serious existential threat to Stack Overflow's revenue model, so the company is desperately trying to find some way to recoup the users (and lost revenue) lost to ChatGPT. '' said the official. “And the way they seem to have chosen to bring them back is through a ‘pivot’ of turning the site into a kind of elaborate proprietary ChatGPT clone. ”
That bet became clear last July when Stack Overflow introduced OverflowAI. OverflowAI is an initiative aimed at helping software developers by involving generative AI in the question-and-answer process. This includes making search more conversational, incorporating enterprise knowledge, integrating with Slack, and more.
For example, OverflowAI might provide a summary answer to a question (a remix of a human-authored answer that includes citations) rather than a community-ranked list of different answers of varying quality. “We want users of our public platforms to be able to instantly receive reliable and accurate solutions to their problems using GenAI-powered conversational search,” said Prashanth Chandra, CEO at the time. Sekhar said.
Chandrasekar expressed similar sentiments in a statement accompanying the deal with OpenAI. OverflowAPI can be confused with his more popular OverflowAI project from last year, except for one letter.
“Our goal at OverflowAPI and our commitment to advancing the era of socially responsible AI is to use vetted, trusted, and accurate data as the foundation for building and delivering technology solutions to our users. and set new standards.''
However, few details regarding the partnership have been disclosed. According to the announcement, “OpenAI will leverage Stack Overflow's OverflowAPI product and work with Stack Overflow to improve model performance for developers using its products.” Additionally, “Stack Overflow will utilize his OpenAI models as part of OverflowAI's development and will work with OpenAI to leverage insights from internal testing to maximize the performance of his OpenAI models.”
Members of the Stack Overflow community asked for more details in various responses to the partnership announcement, but to no avail.
“We understand that there is a desire to know more specifics, but we just announced the partnership today,” staff moderator Rosie said in response to a request for more details. “We will need to share more with our partners about how the integration will work as work begins in the future.”
OpenAI and Stack Overflow did not immediately respond to requests for further clarification on the deal. ®
