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CEO Update: Paving the road forward with AI and community at the center

31 points by joebiden2 3y ago

whynotmaybe 3y ago
I feel kinda less sad that I didn't get the job at SO that I interviewed for last summer. With tools that allow you to download pre-trained models and run them on premises, I start to doubt the future of SO for Teams.
kagn10 3y ago
[flagged]
codetrotter 3y ago
Here is an example page I made inspired by StackOverflow and Quora. I think StackOverflow could do something like that; have a bot account owned by StackOverflow that would respond to posts. Here is the example I made: https://doc.nstr.no/bitcoin_background https://doc.nstr.no/bitcoin_background
- GordonS 3y ago
  This could actually work quite well. Imagine if every SO question automatically had a ChatGPT-generated answer applied to it, but in wiki fashion, so it could be modified to remove errors, add additional context, point out hallucinations etc. At the same time, humans could still answer too, providing alternative/better solutions, which ultimately are fed back into ChatGPT.
  - vlaqr 3y ago
    It could work, but which human would be so self-hating as to overtly work towards replacing himself?
    - maratc 3y ago
      Humans mostly wouldn't care about things so complex or remote as e.g. robots replacing them. E.g. truck drivers wouldn't actively destroy cameras attached to their trucks, even if you tell them that the video feeds from these cameras could be fed to models that might allow driverless trucks, which might eventually replace them. The link between a camera and elimination of their work is too remote and too vague.
- aeyes 3y ago
  The other day I saw that Quora is already officially showing you ChatGPT answers at the top. Here for example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Arch-Linux https://www.quora.com/What-is-Arch-Linux I think they are digging their own grave with this. Their only advantage is all the SEO work they did to show up in google searches.
p-e-w 3y ago
> “They are creating this culture on Stack Overflow where it’s become a really safe place to ask a question, a safe place to provide an answer, and try to get people closer to their solution, and I think that’s part of what’s made it really successful and where we found a lot of value.” Is this satire? Stack Overflow is infamous for how hostile its culture is towards people asking questions. And I'm sure that the CEO is well aware of that. The fact that they're dropping a quote like this one into the post without a single word even attempting to address SO's well-known culture problems is a slap in the face to anyone familiar with the platform.
- skilled 3y ago
  Anyone care to explain to me what is mean by "safe place"? Was it not safe before? Are Q&A platforms generally known to be unsafe to post on? Genuinely curious. It's such a peculiar choice of words it certainly has intrigued my senses.
  - ironSkillet 3y ago
    I dislike the proliferation of this word. "Safe" has started to mean "free from critical commentary" in a lot of contexts. It's hampering objective discourse all over the place.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      It used to mean physically safe - ie. A gay bar - at least safe from outsiders. Once you move to “emotionally safe” then it basically becomes so vague as to be meaningless
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    The "safe place" stuff is a reference to the recently implemented new Code of Conduct, which bends over backwards to accommodate gender pronouns etc. https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion... Why SO thinks this is the biggest problem they should be solving, or why it took four years to roll out, is beyond me; for one, I can't ever recall discussing or caring about anybody's genitals or lack thereof when posting coding Q&As.
mcenedella 3y ago
Overall, a bad sign for Stack Overflow. When executives write gobbledygook paragraphs such as: “ Since my last quarterly update, companies across nearly every sector have experienced significant transformation—whether it’s a more aggressive focus on profitability or a shift in product strategy due to the acceleration of generative AI (GenAI). Thematically, however, one thing has remained the same: companies are committed to driving productivity and efficiency throughout their organizations. At Stack Overflow, we continue to help our customers and community deliver both.” The unclear and muddy writing reveals that their thinking is likewise unclear. Generalities instead of specifics. Vague platitudes. This is poor writing. StackExchange is facing an existential threat and there is nothing in this letter that names it, identifies steps they’ll take to address, or how they will thrive in the new future. It is not unexpected, but a confirmation of what we all might fear.
- victor9000 3y ago
  My favorite are executives whose products are paying customers of generative AI (aka no moat), yet they parrot platitudes as if they were at the driver's seat.
- brandall10 3y ago
  "companies across nearly every sector"... err, what? No, just companies built on user generated data which in turn is used to train the models that will replace them.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  This assumes AI will be able to offer support outside the trained corpus of human knowledge and generate code with post-training-date apis. These will probably still require human support and feedback so that subsequent AIs can also support them. This means companies like stack overflow will require licensing and compensation for AI corporations to use new data - it won't be free anymore. Data hoarding is the future, not open data sharing (because everyone will fear being replaced). We will see a more closed future behind paywalls. It will be very expensive for subsequent versions of ChatGPT etc. to be trained with up to date knowledge outside of Wikipedia etc.
godzillafarts 3y ago
In my opinion, SO doesn’t really have much of a choice here. Not only has the quality of questions and answers been on the decline, the entire SO experience is notoriously hostile for new comers. I find that ChatGPT/GitHub Copilot tend to give much better answers for the vast majority of programming related questions. It’s much faster, easier, and less intimidating to ask your tools questions knowing that you’ll most likely get a high quality answer and not get admonished for having asked the question in the first place.
- GordonS 3y ago
  > I find that ChatGPT/GitHub Copilot tend to give much better answers for the vast majority of programming related questions I'm not so sure about this. Firstly, ChatGPT seems to hallucinate quite a lot, which can result in me wasting a lot of time, especially when the hallucinations aren't immediately apparent. Secondly, presumably the content of Stackoverflow had been used to train ChatGPT... so if Stackoverflow and all of it's human-generated content disappeared, to be replaced by AI-generated content, that could be a bad thing for ChatGPT in the long run.
fabian2k 3y ago
The blog post is entirely marketing and tries to obfuscate or ignore the trouble AI-generated content is causing on SO. The company has enacted a deeply unpopular policy this week that essentially makes it impossible to moderate most AI-generated posts on Stack Overflow. Laying off 10% of the company after putting another 10% of the company on developing AI-anything do look more like panic to me. AI-generated content is threatening one half of their business model, and additionally causing moderation issues as well on the public sites.
hrpnk 3y ago
If they monetize content, it would be nice for the community to get a revenue share for its content authorship and moderation.
paddw 3y ago
> We want to be able to continue to invest back into our community, and that’s why we’re also exploring what data monetization looks like in the future. LLMs are trained off Stack Overflow data, which our massive community has contributed to for nearly 15 years. We should be compensated for that data so we can continue to invest back in our community. How exactly are you planning on investing that back into the community? It sounds like it just wants to be YOU who captures the value of 15 years of community investment. It's fine, SO is a business, and people agreed to the TOS, but this is laughably blatant bs.
SinParadise 3y ago
Nothing here directly addresses the issue of users migrating away from the flow of `Google search -> SO` to `ChatGPT/Phind`. Maybe SO should just acquihire Phind. Use Phind as the gatekeep to filter out questions with well established answers before another doe-eyed user make the fatal mistake of asking a non well-formed question before they are excoriated by the poweruser #44956.
- parasti 3y ago
  Are users migrating to Phind? ChatGPT was all over HN when it came out, but this comment is the first time I hear about Phind.
tough 3y ago
Funny ancedota, I use a chrome extension that adds chatgpt to all of stack overflow posts. You get answers to unanswered posts with 0 replys that are useful that way Stack Overflow is doomed
nologic01 3y ago
It is funny to read all this "SO is doomed and AI is good enough". It shows that people have basically no clue how LLM's work, ascribing superpowers (which is ofcourse congruent with the hype) If the free humam labor solving diverse coding problems in public repositories stops, any such trained LLM solution will gradually degrade, e.g it will have no material around new libraries, new languages etc.
- CamelCaseName 3y ago
  Will it though? Maybe "All You Need Is Documentation"™, and you can transpose previous coding queries and answers onto new languages.
raesene9 3y ago
[dead]
raymondgh 3y ago
I was expecting an expensive data export feature and updated ToS
aigoochamna 3y ago
Anyone else think Stackoverflow has been in a decline the past decade? Stackoverflow hardly surfaces when I am searching for help and when I find answers it's usually a blog or a hosted blog somewhere. Most Stackoverflow answers are usually 4-5 years old and outdated. Perhaps it's simply my engineering has improved in the last decade and I no longer search for help very often and when I do it's outside the scope of Stackoverflow..

31 points by joebiden2 3y ago

I feel kinda less sad that I didn't get the job at SO that I interviewed for last summer. With tools that allow you to download pre-trained models and run them on premises, I start to doubt the future of SO for Teams.

kagn10 3y ago

[flagged]

codetrotter 3y ago

Here is an example page I made inspired by StackOverflow and Quora. I think StackOverflow could do something like that; have a bot account owned by StackOverflow that would respond to posts. Here is the example I made: https://doc.nstr.no/bitcoin_background https://doc.nstr.no/bitcoin_background

GordonS 3y ago
This could actually work quite well. Imagine if every SO question automatically had a ChatGPT-generated answer applied to it, but in wiki fashion, so it could be modified to remove errors, add additional context, point out hallucinations etc. At the same time, humans could still answer too, providing alternative/better solutions, which ultimately are fed back into ChatGPT.
- vlaqr 3y ago
  It could work, but which human would be so self-hating as to overtly work towards replacing himself?
  - maratc 3y ago
    Humans mostly wouldn't care about things so complex or remote as e.g. robots replacing them. E.g. truck drivers wouldn't actively destroy cameras attached to their trucks, even if you tell them that the video feeds from these cameras could be fed to models that might allow driverless trucks, which might eventually replace them. The link between a camera and elimination of their work is too remote and too vague.
aeyes 3y ago
The other day I saw that Quora is already officially showing you ChatGPT answers at the top. Here for example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-Arch-Linux https://www.quora.com/What-is-Arch-Linux I think they are digging their own grave with this. Their only advantage is all the SEO work they did to show up in google searches.

p-e-w 3y ago

> “They are creating this culture on Stack Overflow where it’s become a really safe place to ask a question, a safe place to provide an answer, and try to get people closer to their solution, and I think that’s part of what’s made it really successful and where we found a lot of value.” Is this satire? Stack Overflow is infamous for how hostile its culture is towards people asking questions. And I'm sure that the CEO is well aware of that. The fact that they're dropping a quote like this one into the post without a single word even attempting to address SO's well-known culture problems is a slap in the face to anyone familiar with the platform.

skilled 3y ago
Anyone care to explain to me what is mean by "safe place"? Was it not safe before? Are Q&A platforms generally known to be unsafe to post on? Genuinely curious. It's such a peculiar choice of words it certainly has intrigued my senses.
- ironSkillet 3y ago
  I dislike the proliferation of this word. "Safe" has started to mean "free from critical commentary" in a lot of contexts. It's hampering objective discourse all over the place.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    It used to mean physically safe - ie. A gay bar - at least safe from outsiders. Once you move to “emotionally safe” then it basically becomes so vague as to be meaningless
- resolutebat 3y ago
  The "safe place" stuff is a reference to the recently implemented new Code of Conduct, which bends over backwards to accommodate gender pronouns etc. https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2019/10/10/iterating-on-inclusion... Why SO thinks this is the biggest problem they should be solving, or why it took four years to roll out, is beyond me; for one, I can't ever recall discussing or caring about anybody's genitals or lack thereof when posting coding Q&As.

mcenedella 3y ago

Overall, a bad sign for Stack Overflow. When executives write gobbledygook paragraphs such as: “ Since my last quarterly update, companies across nearly every sector have experienced significant transformation—whether it’s a more aggressive focus on profitability or a shift in product strategy due to the acceleration of generative AI (GenAI). Thematically, however, one thing has remained the same: companies are committed to driving productivity and efficiency throughout their organizations. At Stack Overflow, we continue to help our customers and community deliver both.” The unclear and muddy writing reveals that their thinking is likewise unclear. Generalities instead of specifics. Vague platitudes. This is poor writing. StackExchange is facing an existential threat and there is nothing in this letter that names it, identifies steps they’ll take to address, or how they will thrive in the new future. It is not unexpected, but a confirmation of what we all might fear.

victor9000 3y ago
My favorite are executives whose products are paying customers of generative AI (aka no moat), yet they parrot platitudes as if they were at the driver's seat.
brandall10 3y ago
"companies across nearly every sector"... err, what? No, just companies built on user generated data which in turn is used to train the models that will replace them.
mensetmanusman 3y ago
This assumes AI will be able to offer support outside the trained corpus of human knowledge and generate code with post-training-date apis. These will probably still require human support and feedback so that subsequent AIs can also support them. This means companies like stack overflow will require licensing and compensation for AI corporations to use new data - it won't be free anymore. Data hoarding is the future, not open data sharing (because everyone will fear being replaced). We will see a more closed future behind paywalls. It will be very expensive for subsequent versions of ChatGPT etc. to be trained with up to date knowledge outside of Wikipedia etc.

godzillafarts 3y ago

In my opinion, SO doesn’t really have much of a choice here. Not only has the quality of questions and answers been on the decline, the entire SO experience is notoriously hostile for new comers. I find that ChatGPT/GitHub Copilot tend to give much better answers for the vast majority of programming related questions. It’s much faster, easier, and less intimidating to ask your tools questions knowing that you’ll most likely get a high quality answer and not get admonished for having asked the question in the first place.

GordonS 3y ago
> I find that ChatGPT/GitHub Copilot tend to give much better answers for the vast majority of programming related questions I'm not so sure about this. Firstly, ChatGPT seems to hallucinate quite a lot, which can result in me wasting a lot of time, especially when the hallucinations aren't immediately apparent. Secondly, presumably the content of Stackoverflow had been used to train ChatGPT... so if Stackoverflow and all of it's human-generated content disappeared, to be replaced by AI-generated content, that could be a bad thing for ChatGPT in the long run.

fabian2k 3y ago

The blog post is entirely marketing and tries to obfuscate or ignore the trouble AI-generated content is causing on SO. The company has enacted a deeply unpopular policy this week that essentially makes it impossible to moderate most AI-generated posts on Stack Overflow. Laying off 10% of the company after putting another 10% of the company on developing AI-anything do look more like panic to me. AI-generated content is threatening one half of their business model, and additionally causing moderation issues as well on the public sites.

hrpnk 3y ago

If they monetize content, it would be nice for the community to get a revenue share for its content authorship and moderation.

paddw 3y ago

> We want to be able to continue to invest back into our community, and that’s why we’re also exploring what data monetization looks like in the future. LLMs are trained off Stack Overflow data, which our massive community has contributed to for nearly 15 years. We should be compensated for that data so we can continue to invest back in our community. How exactly are you planning on investing that back into the community? It sounds like it just wants to be YOU who captures the value of 15 years of community investment. It's fine, SO is a business, and people agreed to the TOS, but this is laughably blatant bs.

SinParadise 3y ago

Nothing here directly addresses the issue of users migrating away from the flow of `Google search -> SO` to `ChatGPT/Phind`. Maybe SO should just acquihire Phind. Use Phind as the gatekeep to filter out questions with well established answers before another doe-eyed user make the fatal mistake of asking a non well-formed question before they are excoriated by the poweruser #44956.

parasti 3y ago
Are users migrating to Phind? ChatGPT was all over HN when it came out, but this comment is the first time I hear about Phind.

tough 3y ago

Funny ancedota, I use a chrome extension that adds chatgpt to all of stack overflow posts. You get answers to unanswered posts with 0 replys that are useful that way Stack Overflow is doomed

nologic01 3y ago

It is funny to read all this "SO is doomed and AI is good enough". It shows that people have basically no clue how LLM's work, ascribing superpowers (which is ofcourse congruent with the hype) If the free humam labor solving diverse coding problems in public repositories stops, any such trained LLM solution will gradually degrade, e.g it will have no material around new libraries, new languages etc.

CamelCaseName 3y ago
Will it though? Maybe "All You Need Is Documentation"™, and you can transpose previous coding queries and answers onto new languages.

raesene9 3y ago

[dead]

raymondgh 3y ago

I was expecting an expensive data export feature and updated ToS

aigoochamna 3y ago

Anyone else think Stackoverflow has been in a decline the past decade? Stackoverflow hardly surfaces when I am searching for help and when I find answers it's usually a blog or a hosted blog somewhere. Most Stackoverflow answers are usually 4-5 years old and outdated. Perhaps it's simply my engineering has improved in the last decade and I no longer search for help very often and when I do it's outside the scope of Stackoverflow..