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OverflowAI
- asicsp 3y agoBlog post: https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/07/27/announcing-overflowai/ https://stackoverflow.blog/2023/07/27/announcing-overflowai/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wodenokoto 3y agoI read the announcement on VentureBeat, and I am not sure what they are trying to do. >Integrating AI with code development is something that Microsoft has been doing for several years with its Github Copilot technology. Chandrasekar said that Overflow AI is not an attempt to replace Github Copilot, but rather to just provide more information resources to developers and the organizations they work for. >“We’re certainly not looking to replace GitHub copilot, we’re very complementary to what you’re actually going to do writing code,” he said. “You need a really solid foundation on Stack Overflow for Teams to give accurate, validated and curated information.” I really do not understand what that means. EDIT at time of writing, link pointed to a Youtube video, now it's a text announcement, so I am gonna go read that.
- sebzim4500 3y agoThis cites specific answers, copilot doesn't?
- meepmorp 3y ago> I really do not understand what that means. Leveraging synergies to provide value to key stakeholders, through community engagement and partnerships with industry thought leaders.
- EspressoGPT 3y ago> Leveraging synergies, provide value, key stakeholders, community engagement, partnerships with industry thought leaders The more buzzwords there are in the text, the less I understand the text.
- atonse 3y agoSomeone had probably paid McKinsey millions of dollars for a sentence like that.
- meepmorp 3y agoAnd here I am handing them out for free, like a sucker.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoDid you get this through a generator?
- meepmorp 3y agoI'll have you know it's 100% organic, all-natural handmade bullshit.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoYou should be proud. Your text literally made me feel like 'oh this ** again'.
- chefandy 3y agoIt's a whole new paradigm! The rules have changed.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoThey are trying to remain relevant with the latest tech buzzwords. I think what we're seeing is a lot of companies jumping on the hype curve for AI similar to when there were a lot of ICO's during the hype cycle of crypto. I'm not comparing AI to crypto as technologies or anything, just the hype cycles.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- inhumantsar 3y agoStack Overflow for Teams is meant to be an internal knowledge base for company specific questions. What he's saying is that they're going to focus on delivering answers that only an internal knowledge base can supply. This would be complementary to co pilot which can only give you generalized answers.
- srameshc 3y agoThis product announcement video could have been better with a good narrator and crisp message instead.
- capableweb 3y agoI'm glad it's not just me. Sounds like it's been recorded with a laptop microphone by someone random they grabbed in the corridor. The chosen music is also very strange, giving the video a strong enterprisey mood.
- quenix 3y agoAt first I thought it was a recording of a zoom call. That’s how bad it is. Seems like a rushed launch. Do we think that this launching a mere 2 days after the infamous Fall Of StackOverflow post is a coincidence?
- sharemywin 3y agoNot sure why they don't add an AI answer that can be upvoted/downvoted just like anyone else.
- layer8 3y agoMaybe too costly to do for all questions across the board. And of course it would incentivize posting questions to troll the AI.
- falcor84 3y agoI actually think that could be an amazing resource to benchmark the LLM - essentially incentivizing people with internet points to find particularly difficult or edge-case questions, that would help improve the model.
- hashtag-til 3y agoBecause that would be too useful.
- hiccuphippo 3y agoI can see a lot of people downvoting those answers out of principle and to troll with the feedback.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoAs a developer with that I still laughingly refer to as a "career", ChatGPT/Copilot /etc is starting to feel very much like "we're going to need to let you go, but we'd like you to stay on for a while to train your replacement." Maybe its all unavoidable, but I don't want it.
- willsmith72 3y agoReally? I just see it as a huge productivity booster, especially for small teams where you can't have experts in every area. I don't foresee an AI being able to replace an engineer for real production-grade custom software for a long time
- vouaobrasil 3y agoFor how long a time? At the beginning of the devlopment of computer chess, people said it would NEVER beat a reasonable player. Then it did. Then they said it would NEVER beat a seasoned tournament player, and it did. They said it would NEVER beat an international master or grandmaster...but it did. People keep saying never. Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time. You might be safe in your job, but what about your children or grandchildren?
- webdood90 3y agoI don't see value in worrying about it. We definitely can't stop it from happening. Yeah, it's gonna suck for us, but it's gonna suck more for a lot of other jobs a lot sooner.
- capableweb 3y ago> Our society can never fall...but societies have fallen since the dawn of time I guess the modern answer from a globalist is that back in the day, societies weren't as entangled as they are today, so they could go into freefall relatively easily with little impact by other societies, so they let them fall, especially if it was beneficial for them. But today everything is so interconnected that if one fall, it would heavily impact a large part of the rest of the societies, that we cannot let it happen. Just look at how unimportant most people would consider Ukraine to be, before the invasion. But it has a huge impact on large sectors, and most countries would have this impact. Some areas of the world, like the Eurozone, even purposefully lock themselves in with their partners so if Greece gets impacted by something, member states have to help them as it'll impact them greatly if they don't. So I guess my end argument is that there isn't really "societies" anymore, we're just part of a global one where the decentralized nature is so strong that we cannot really fail (globally) anymore unless there is something really big impacting all of us (like COVID).
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoWho actually wants this?
- ToniCipriani 3y agoGotta cash in the buzz word somehow.
- whoomp12342 3y agomarketing people, Funding people
- ilaksh 3y agoIf it works, I do. I would prefer to deal with an AI that I know will be polite and objective rather than trying to game the system or overly anxious to close everything.
- mcny 3y agoThis is a great way to make everyone angry. People asking questions will be angry because the bot okayed the question, why did the mods close it without discussion? Mods will be angry because why did the bot okay stupid questions? And it doesn't even go into the meat of the problem - stack overflow is supposed to allow everyone, including its competitors, free access to all the questions and answers. The questions and answers belong to the users, not to the CEO of stack overflow. My conspiracy theory is Joel Spolsky saw the writing on the wall long ago: > The company has been growing, too. Today we are profitable. We have almost 300 amazing employees worldwide and booked $70m in revenue last year. We have talent, advertising, and software products. The SaaS products (Stack Overflow for Teams and Enterprise) are growing at 200% a year. That speaks to the fact that we’ve recruited an incredibly talented team that has produced such fantastic results. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-stack-overflow/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2019/03/28/the-next-ceo-of-st... I think this hn comment summarizes it best https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36890672 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36890672 -- > In May I wrote about Stack Overflow's business, which lost $42 million over 6 months and had just laid off 10% of its employees. Since then, the company's fiscal year-end results came out. Despite growing revenue, it lost $84 million over the year ending on March 31, 2023. Thank god Wikipedia isn’t run like Stack Overflow. As an end user, they have pretty much the same value proposition: user generated answers to my questions. Wikipedia is still doing well, meanwhile it seems SO is constantly being driven off a cliff by bimbos in management. Not everything needs to be a damn unicorn. SO is an information repository. They need to accept that stop trying to “enhance” it with more crap because they don’t realize their median user is a junior dev who really just needs to serialize a Java object and isn’t going to pay or put up with any LLM-generated nonsense. SO doesn’t need large language models. What they really need is a better model of what answers are good, what answers are outdated, and what answers should be expanded to include more info (and sometimes, what answers should be slimmed down a bit). Turn the top answer to popular questions into a wiki so that everyone can update it. And then add backlinks for questions which were closed for being “duplicates”. It solves so many problems SO has. Another thing. This “comments aren’t for extended discussion” nonsense needs to go too. Any question could easily include a Reddit-style discussion tab to facilitate discussion. I’m sure much of it would be at least as valuable as the answers themselves.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoApplying AI to Stack Overflow to make the site have more relevant content (e.g. tag outdated, apply version info) would be detrimental to their revenue model. Going through all the content on SO and tagging it with the relevant versions the answer applies to would be immensely helpful to users but would make page views fall off a cliff most likely. I read something recent that the SO revenue is dropping and was showing signs of this before the recent AI push. In my opinion, this is because video is king with younger people and SO is geared towards people with beginner questions. You can find a huge amount of sw dev instructional content on youtube.
- b112 3y agoYou can find a huge amount of sw dev instructional content on youtube. Yes, because it is harder to copy/paste, and set up as your own page. Bit what a way to learn! 10 minute video vs 10 seconds of reading.
- forgotusername6 3y agoI absolutely cannot stand video tutorials for basic things. Why write the text of a command when you can stretch it out to 10 minutes of video? Perhaps even ask people to subscribe or buy from your sponsor while you're at it.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoOh I am in full agreement. I think its a generational thing though where younger folks might prefer looking in yt first for instructional types of things rather than a QA site.
- mrtranscendence 3y agoFor what it’s worth, I’m 41 and I often prefer video content. It keeps me on track when my attention span would get in the way were I reading a longer tutorial or manual.
- whoomp12342 3y agoPerfect! this way generative AI can tell me why my question is dumb and why I shouldn't even be writing it this way to begin with!
- xtracto 3y agoAnd then you will find an answer that is like 10 years old for a version of the technology that is no longer maintained. Seriously, try to find something relevant say for Ionic Framework , and most of the answers in StackOverflow are outdated garbage that was only relevant for Angular based Ionic. The first thing StackOverflow should use AI for is to clean up those "hundreds of thousands of answers" so that the irrelevant things are removed. Right now StackOverflow feels like the library's "Technical Book" aisles around the 2000s, with tons of books about "Office 97", "Visual Basic 6", "QBasic by Example", and similar obsolete books.
- xd1936 3y agoAI chatbot marked as duplicate. Closed and locked by moderator.
- hashtag-til 3y agoNo serious company is integrating that before certainty on the licensing terms of the generated code, and that is not a trivial problem to untangle.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoI regret to inform you that multiple serious companies already have.
- hashtag-til 3y agoWhich just opens the gates of liability hell for them.
- tpxl 3y agoI'm 97% certain one of these days a judge is going to set a precedent that allows this by going "welp, it would cost too much to untangle this mess, so we'll just allow it".
- usrbinbash 3y agoA lot of companies already allow their developers to use generative AI freely in their workflow.
- chx 3y agoLooking at https://stackoverflow.co/labs/ https://stackoverflow.co/labs/ > The future of collective knowledge sharing. The future is feeding all answers into a meat grinder and then forming word like nuggets from the paste and hope we like this? I am sorry but you lost your mind. There is a very fundamental disconnect between LLM hype and reality. Here is my latest experiment, I needed to search for a string in dangling commits and asked Bing: https://i.imgur.com/pQtpkH5.png https://i.imgur.com/pQtpkH5.png You will notice my question was a link because I copied the title from https://stackoverflow.com/q/21903972/308851 https://stackoverflow.com/q/21903972/308851 and apparently that made it into a link (I had the question open because every time I need to do this I just jump to this question, I outsourced storing my knowledge to SO ages ago). Every single answer given by Bing is wrong, of course, because git log -g is not appropriate for this as the answer states. It's right there: "Commits that are (still) referenced by the reflog are considered reachable and not dangling". And here's the best part: the Learn More 1. Stackoverflow.com links to this very question. The language model have seen "git log -g" in the vicinity of the string "Search for string in dangling commits in Git" and thought it's appropriate. The irony.
- airza 3y agoI don't like the profit motives, but it's tough for me to argue that the experience of using stackoverflow is better than just jamming my question into chatgpt.
- chx 3y agoExcept the information value coming out of a chatgpt answer is zero. You are literally best off if you ignore whatever it says.
- airza 3y agoIt's really not though. I ask it questions about typescript all the time: "i want to do X with types, how do i express this in TS syntax?" and it answers correctly. No disagreement that i don't always agree with its subjective judgment, but that is on par with subjective opinions on stack overflow.
- pluc 3y agoRelated from 2 days ago: The Fall of Stack Overflow https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36855516 sorry I couldn't help myself.
- ilaksh 3y agoDoes anyone know what models they are using behind the scenes?
- TillE 3y agoTheir VS Code demo question ("Do we use tabs or spaces?") is a clever one, but then it's just pulling from an answer on their Q&A site. Not particularly impressive in an AI sense. The Copilot Chat beta is able to answer this question by itself in VS Code, though not in Visual Studio.
- nomilk 3y agoSo it's a ChatGPT-like interface to Stack Overflow data? What are its advantages over ChatGPT? (it cites sources, but I can't spot any others). This is also noteworthy [1]: > we're using AI to take existing knowledge sources (confluence, github, google drive etc) and provide an initial tagging framework and a series of questions and answers from them What for? Presumably an LLM trained on a company's internal data, but with higher start up cost (time taken for initial tagging). [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM9-cYyeaDg&t=2m28s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM9-cYyeaDg&t=2m28s
- bitshiftfaced 3y agoDoesn't this use case just get gobbled up by Google/Bing, as many people tend to search for these problems and then click on the Stack Overflow link? The search engine's LLM response will answer the question first.
- mplewis 3y agoCool! More features from SO that no one wants!
- whywhywhywhy 3y agoObvious they started to work on this only after DAU tanked when it was too late not when they should have which was the launch of Copilot
- janalsncm 3y agoAside from the generative stuff, SO is finally including semantic search capabilities. Their search is currently terrible. However, search itself is a huge endeavor, it’s not enough to just slap ANN on some pregenerated vectors.