(In case anyone is confused, I've merged this thread back - see <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606010" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606010</a> for details.)
This is the person who cancelled SO jobs.<p>SO jobs should have been an absolute gold mine, instead he cancelled it.<p>Makes no sense to me. If you can’t make a ton of money on job ads on Stack Overflow then you’re not trying.<p>It’s true that SO was doing SO jobs wrong, but it should have been fixed, not cancelled.
>>Just as tractors made farmers more productive ...<p>really, that is example used? If AI will do to development was tractors did to farming there is not going to be many developers left.<p>>>today’s AI the potential for the loss of certain jobs, yes, but also, if history is a guide, a future in which a great variety of more highly skilled work<p>Ag -> Industrial -> Information transitions were all supported by a mix of massive expansion in population, mass migration of populations, and globalization of economies<p>information -> automation / AI transition does not seem to have these 3 things in the same way. Globalism is slowing or reversing into protectionism. Migration is still high but seemingly for different reasons (geopolitical) as people displaced for war, crime, or climate and critical for this discussion population growth as SLOWED way down, and it expected to reverse about 2040.<p>This means people looking at the historical models for how these tech disruptions played out are very flawed in their "everything will be just fine because Farmers became factory workers, and factory workers became developers"<p>Current economic models may not play out like they did in the past. History may rhyme, but it does not actually repeat.<p>Also lets not forget the terrible way society in general handled these previous transitions that resulted is massive amounts of suffering for the people displaced. "Learn to AI" can not become the mantra of the day like "Learn to Code" did....<p>My prediction is we will see a MASSIVE increase in wealth gaps, and extreme decrease in standard of living in most of the industrial world (we are already seeing this in a limited way) leading to more and more political instability
Huh. The way I see SO and the future of AI is ... I don't. I don't bother looking at SO any more for the easy questions, I just use ChatGPT. It's not perfect, but neither is SO, and ChatGPT is faster and more polite.<p>I still don't think ChatGPT is really coming for software engineers' jobs anytime soon, though. A high level programming language is about telling a computer exactly what you want as succinctly as possible. By the time you get specific enough with ChatGPT to produce said code, you could just write that code yourself. Without the non-deterministic behavior, too.<p>But as a helper tool, it's remarkably useful.
I don't think I've ever seen a post on SO with that many downvotes before. That's pretty telling how the community feels about being used as training data (especially backed up by the highly upvoted reply saying such).
Prashanth Chandrasekar was brought in as the hatchet man to facilitate the sale after destroying Rackspace. Fired the beloved community managers and the community became much more hostile since. Why are any of you surprised he is out of touch with the community?<p>SO should be ran by a foundation funded by tech companies enlightened enough to realize the massive productivity gains it produces (with SE as a side goodwill project). In this era, this counts as wishful thinking. Instead we got a 1.8B sale, that's not pocket change, now the profit must flow.<p>This is what Cory Doctorow calls enshittification. <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/" rel="nofollow">https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/</a>
In a way, Community may be the past of AI... Meaning the "Great Pause" [1] could happen, not by decree/law/agreement, but by people who will (out of self-preservation?) stop adding quality content to the free data sources that are SO, GitHub, etc. If ChatGPT and others end up "stuck" with data up to 2023, and the data afterwards are wacked-out conspiracy theories and SEO padded recipes, we may just end up with a "usefulness" limit of transformer AIs in general.<p>[1] <a href="https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experiments/" rel="nofollow">https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/pause-giant-ai-experime...</a>
I'm getting the point of the post, but confused to what it means for community/public SO.<p>Is the essence really: "Please contribute manual qualitative solutions to public SO, so we can use it to train GenAI for our enterprise customers", or have I misread?
Isn't it obvious that the new AI gods will require our regular offerings in the form of text, pictures, music, and anything else that can be manifested in this existence we call reality? Create, and praise the transformers.<p>Amen.
"Community is the future of AI"<p>Comedy gold. So first AI takes content created by human labor without permission or compensation. Then it centralizes the sum of it and monetizes it exclusively.<p>But wait, it gets better. You will now also supply your labor for free to fix/curate the current AI errors. Which will make the AI even better and more profitable, and yourself ever more obsolete over time.<p>Picking our brains to create a giant private for-profit brain. Why would anybody willingly contribute to this scheme with their free time, in a backdrop where their own relevancy is at stake? There is no community without human incentives, every community will starve and die. You can extend this doom scenario to all open (web) content.<p>More pragmatically speaking, StackOverflow is royally screwed. It was already on its way down for various reasons but this is a shock. AI coding assistants are rapidly spreading and improving, making it inevitable that programmers will have less need for a direct visit to SO over time. Worse, those actually keeping the site running is a small group of hardcore volunteers that you just alienated.<p>The future is even more bleak for their enterprise product. Having your private copy of some data and training it for internal use is rapidly being commoditized. Many companies have a Microsoft contract, giving them (potential) access to Azure OpenAI that allows you to do just that.<p>But that doesn't take it far enough and is just an intermediary step. Soon you'll simply point your enterprise AI at everything. Your Wiki, your documents, your SharePoint, your email. All of the companies' knowledge will be at your fingertips from any contextual UI, whether this is Word, Excel, Outlook or your code editor.<p>And not just that, this enterprise intelligence will be combined with the world's intelligence. In such a future, would one seriously need a private copy of StackOverflow? The future I describe is about a year away.
It sounds like he’s suggesting that AI will open up a huge new pool of amateur developers, and those developers will need a community to turn to to know how to leverage AI.<p>But that kinda ignores the impact that AI will have on the concept of the SO community, or whether they’ll even be a need for it.<p>I honestly think his take is a misread of what kind of “community” SO has. My use of SO has always been 99% functional and borderline mercenary. I’m not getting to know anyone, I’m not building relationships, I just need a question answered. There’s nothing sticky about this community other than it being a good place to get those questions answered. As soon as AI can do that, I’ll never return to that “community”, and I’ll miss it as much as I miss Yahoo Answers.
> At Stack Overflow, we’ve had to sit down and ask ourselves some hard questions. What role do we have in the software community when users can ask a chatbot for help as easily as they can another person? How can our business adapt so that we continue to empower technologists to learn, share, and grow?<p>Yes, why would one subject themselves to the toxic SO community when a bot can give you a tailored answer in seconds and doesn't close your question as duplicate.
SO is a toxic cesspool, especially for people new to programming or just looking to learn. If ChatGPT and other AI tools can get the job done without resorting to asking anything from the SO “community”, that’s a victory.
StackOverflow has been sold to a private equity company in 2021. I doubt they care about community building, just using the community for their own profits: <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by-prosus-for-a-reported-1-8-billion/" rel="nofollow">https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/02/stack-overflow-acquired-by...</a>
"It might be in the self-interest of each developer to simply turn to the AI for a quick answer, but unless we all continue contributing knowledge back to a shared, public platform, we risk a world in which knowledge is centralized inside the black box of AI models that require users to pay in order to access their services."<p>A shared, public platform you say? The type of platform that AI will scan and train on? Therefore by contributing to such platform, you actively participate in AI centralization, no?
Here is a discussion of the post at Stackexchange Meta: <a href="https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/388401/new-blog-post-from-our-ceo-prashanth-community-is-the-future-of-ai" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/388401/new-blog-pos...</a><p>Some comments may refer to that discussion post instead of the original blog (e.g. ones talking about downvotes) because it was a separate submission to HN whose comments were moved to this page.
A bunch of the comments seem to be of the opinion that "using LLMs in S/O" === "LLM answering questions"<p>But that isn't the only task available for fancy auto-complete. Eg. The LLM could help novices make better questions, or include more/less context in an answer, with the person still being the arbiter of truth.
Has there ever been a case of a company the size of SO deciding that, given their skills and culture, they’re just going to wind the company down rather than try and compete in a new technical arena that they’re entirely unsuited for? I’d respect that.<p>I don’t know if what he’s suggesting here makes sense (I tend to think no), but I’m automatically a little skeptical of the typical response to a serious threat: “no way, y’all, this is actually <i>good</i> for us!”<p>Imagine google coming out right now and saying the future of AI is search ads.
"Just as tractors made farmers more productive, we believe these new generative AI tools are something all developers will need to use if they want to remain competitive."<p>Yeah it also put a lot of them out of jobs. At least the tractor doesn't steal people's work to resell it, it's just a tool.
Online discussion happens at the edge of what is known and that is where AI learns from. Yes, humans talking in a scrape-able way is needed for the future of AI, but there should really be some way for the teachers of AI to get compensated for their efforts in improving it. If Stack Overflow trains a model on contributor data it should not call the contributors community, but investors with proper compensation.
the use and abuse of the term "community" to mean things convenient to for-profit content aggregators. What could be wrong with the New Digital Feudalism?
I would suspect that the company is too small to train their own LLM from scratch. But Stack Overflow probably has too much traffic to just pay for something like the ChatGPT API and built something on top of it. I'm not sure how many good options there are in between, can you realistically create your own LLM for this kind of specialized area without the kind of resources OpenAI/Google/Microsoft have?
seems folks are mad because Stack exchange ceo wants to use their own LLM to provide answers on their site. Which is something that other SE sites have banned as answers previously.
I've been thinking of making a community in Japan for AI founders.
I think we should all be conversing over a variety of thing and helping each other to succeed. There is some fear of colluding of of course, but we can put the right rails in place.<p>AI is hard, sales is hard. We don't all need to compete.
I wonder what you all think?
I love AI as a coding assistant but in the last few days ChatGPT4 has given me bug ridden code multiple times.<p>edit: oops I left the tab open and this one got marked as a dupe in the mean time. Although this submission actually went to a different place..
I was hoping that the title "Community Is the Future of AI" would refer to the exciting community that's growing around Generative AI in SF. There was an awesome hackathon this past weekend and a fun networking event on Friday. "Cerebral Valley" (not sure if this is a company or an unofficial org of people from hacker houses) is a major (but certainly not the only) source of such events [1]. VCs, Twitter influencers, early-stage founders, and college grads have all been organizing other events, and so far, it's been a magical community (and hopefully this community is a net positive for the future of AI).<p>[1] <a href="https://cerebralvalley.ai/" rel="nofollow">https://cerebralvalley.ai/</a>
Open AI assistants should really be implemented on open protocols with open payments. Nostr is a perfect protocol for that because of Zaps which can provide a strong alignment signal to the (various different) communities — not just white “western” men.
Comments moved to <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35604002" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35604002</a>, which has the original source and was posted earlier.<p>Edit: since the current url has more information (as alecco pointed out downthread) I'm going to reverse this. Sorry everyone! I'm also going to edit the title to make it clear that it's not just the blog post but also the community discussion.
The fact that this post by Prashanth Abd al-Rahman (SO CEO) is so downvoted makes me think he's onto something. This is like when artists cry because of how good Midjourney is and they'll have to switch careers. If programmers are complaining about AI it's because it's good.
Providing this is opt in i'm pretty OK with it, unless i'm missing something?<p>We trialed a private SO instance at work, and discoverability was an issue (now we have to search slack engineering channels, check notion, and check SO).<p>If I could quickly ask, in for example slack, a question in natural language and have it query our private SO, slack, notion etc, I would be pretty game (providing this data remains private).