On SO I can spend time digging through the questions the search index thinks are related, reading through the answers and the comments on the answers. If I'm lucky I find what I need. If not I then need to spend another bunch of time trying to formulate a question in a way that won't get down voted or marked as a duplicate. Then I need to wait for an answer.<p>Or I can spend a much shorter amount of time formulating a question for Chat-GPT and generally get a helpful, focused answer without any pedantic digressions.<p>It seems likely that the AI benefits from the information in SO. If Open AI can help improve the SO experience that would be fantastic.
This was so vague that my take is a bit different than everyone else's here – my guess is that developers love StackOverflow, hate that OpenAI is stealing their info and destroying SO, and OpenAI sees this as a cheap way to curry favor with developers (and based on the response here, it's not working).<p>I think both SO and OpenAI see the writing on the wall (unfortunately). The real "partnership" is OpenAI gets to say "look, we're working together!" to avoid accusations of destroying SO, and SO gets to save a little bit of face (and hopefully make a little money) on the way down.
While it makes sense for SO to do this, I can't help but feel uneasy about the consolidation of all these resources.<p>Microsoft, `Open`AI, Github, LinkedIn, Stackoverflow .. Feels like it will end badly.
I would appreciate if stackoverflow integrated something like a REPL or replit in their Q&A to reproduce example easily (maybe even CI?). For Python it would actually be very easy with backends such as Google Colab or even built-in ChatGPT Code Interpreter.
I go to chatgpt for boilerplate library stuff, but S/O had actual people responding. It was a great thing that Guido was taking the time to respond human to human for questions related to how certain things are implemented.
Stack Overflow must have had a pretty good one-over on OpenAI, because you know OpenAI is already training on that data, to leverage it into a partnership. Maybe OpenAI's lawyers are scared of the CC BY-SA license?
The thing that makes me so sad about this: when I steal an answer from StackOverflow I always put a comment linking to where I got the answer. I could pretend that I do this because it's a good software maintenance practice. Truthfully, I only do it because <i>it's the right thing to do.</i> It's about professionalism and integrity.<p>Laundering human responses via a large language model not only makes it impossible to acknowledge SO contributors: it encourages people to think GPT figured these things out solely because it's simply so darn clever.<p>It doesn't help that SO's marketing is encouraging developers to not care about integrity or professionalism:<p>> provide OpenAI users and customers with the accurate and vetted data foundation that AI tools need to quickly find a solution to a problem so that technologists can stay focused on priority tasks.<p>Hey buddy, you got <i>priority tasks</i> to focus on. Just let the plagiarism robot do its thing.
Funny how this is announced in the same week that the user with the second-highest reputation on Stack Overflow admitted to having written thousands of answers using an AI tool (<a href="https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072/a-commitment-to-amend-and-move-forward" rel="nofollow">https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/430072/a-commitment...</a>).
What would be a typical coding question which AI would not be able to answer in the near future without having access to Stack Overflow?<p>I find it hard to imagine that AI will need humans to teach it technologies like programming languages and APIs for long.<p>We don't need humans to teach computers how to play chess anymore.
Shit, guess we need a replacement for Stack Overflow now as well. Sad to see these companies handing over all their data to these copyright infringing criminals.<p>And no, buying the rights after you've already stolen all the data to make billions is not acceptable.
If anyone wants their data back in a way they can use it, it's right here <a href="https://seqlite.puny.engineering" rel="nofollow">https://seqlite.puny.engineering</a><p>And I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that their trade dress is MIT licensed. <a href="https://stackoverflow.design" rel="nofollow">https://stackoverflow.design</a><p>Have fun.
So now chatgpt will become an even more obnoxious elitist "helper", telling you that you've asked a very basic question that even the most basic search query would have answered it. Go back and RTFM!
If I wanted to use OpenAI, I would. If I wanted to use StackOverflow, I would. Now I just only get to use OpenAI no matter what.<p>This hellscape is forming way too fast.
Making moves like these in an obvious attempt at pulling up the ladder behind them, while saying that "startup culture" is still important in ML. As usual don't believe anything sama is saying.
At some point in the future, economics textbooks will teach about "the programmer ouroboros". A group of high-skilled people who existed between ~1960-2040, whose collaborative and open approach to information sharing was ultimately used to render their own profession defunct.