4 ms·

Stackexchange is most directly under threat (from the current "chat" AI UI).

jacurtis 3y ago
One could argue they actually stand the most to gain and could expand under AI. Everything I have seen so far about AI seems to indicate that you won't want to have one main AI model to go to, but instead there will be thousands of competitive AI models that are tailored for expertise in different niches. StackOverflow will certaintly need to morph to get there, but the market share they already have in code-solving questions still makes it a destination. Which gives them an advantage at solving the next stage of this need. I see a world where someone could post a question on StackOverflow and get an AI response in return. This would satisfy 95% of questions on the site. If they question the accuracy of the AI response or don't feel that it is adequately explained, they put a "bounty" (SO already does this) to get humans to review the original prompt, AI response, and then have a public forum about the corrections or clarifications for the AI response. This could work in a similar manner to how it does now. A public Q+A style forum with upvoting and comments. This could actually increase the value of the site overall. Many people go to Google for quick error searches first. Only if they are truly stumped do they go to StackOverflow. But with a specially tailored AI model, people may stop using Google for the initial search and do it at StackOverflow instead since they will likely have the absolute most accurate software engineering AI model due to the quality of the training data (the StackOverflow website and the perpetual feedback via the Q+A portion explained above). This actually could lead to a significant market shift away from Google for any and all programming questions and towards the StackOverflow AI instead. While still preserving the Q+A portion of the site in a way to satisfy users, and also improve the training of their AI model. For me, I would be more interested in the site. Right now if you go there, you will see 1000's of questions posted per day, most of which are nonsense RTFM[1] questions. But there are very interesting discussions that could arise if you could only have the interesting questions and have all the bad questions answered by AI and not cluttering up the public discussion. I could see personally subscribing to all questions that the AI bot stumbles on for the language or frameworks that interest me. I think there would be a lot of good discussions and learning from those questions if that was all the site was. [1] - Read The F**ing Manual

One could argue they actually stand the most to gain and could expand under AI. Everything I have seen so far about AI seems to indicate that you won't want to have one main AI model to go to, but instead there will be thousands of competitive AI models that are tailored for expertise in different niches. StackOverflow will certaintly need to morph to get there, but the market share they already have in code-solving questions still makes it a destination. Which gives them an advantage at solving the next stage of this need. I see a world where someone could post a question on StackOverflow and get an AI response in return. This would satisfy 95% of questions on the site. If they question the accuracy of the AI response or don't feel that it is adequately explained, they put a "bounty" (SO already does this) to get humans to review the original prompt, AI response, and then have a public forum about the corrections or clarifications for the AI response. This could work in a similar manner to how it does now. A public Q+A style forum with upvoting and comments. This could actually increase the value of the site overall. Many people go to Google for quick error searches first. Only if they are truly stumped do they go to StackOverflow. But with a specially tailored AI model, people may stop using Google for the initial search and do it at StackOverflow instead since they will likely have the absolute most accurate software engineering AI model due to the quality of the training data (the StackOverflow website and the perpetual feedback via the Q+A portion explained above). This actually could lead to a significant market shift away from Google for any and all programming questions and towards the StackOverflow AI instead. While still preserving the Q+A portion of the site in a way to satisfy users, and also improve the training of their AI model. For me, I would be more interested in the site. Right now if you go there, you will see 1000's of questions posted per day, most of which are nonsense RTFM[1] questions. But there are very interesting discussions that could arise if you could only have the interesting questions and have all the bad questions answered by AI and not cluttering up the public discussion. I could see personally subscribing to all questions that the AI bot stumbles on for the language or frameworks that interest me. I think there would be a lot of good discussions and learning from those questions if that was all the site was. [1] - Read The F**ing Manual