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After ChatGPT Disruption, Stack Overflow Lays Off 28 Percent of Staff

posted by hubie on Wednesday October 18 2023, @09:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the your-ban-is-now-irrelevant dept.

Both Freeman and upstart wrote in with:

After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff:

Stack Overflow used to be every developer's favorite site for coding help, but with the rise of generative AI like ChatGPT, chatbots can offer more specific help than a 5-year-old forum post ever could.

[...] You might think of Stack Overflow as "just a forum," but the company is working on a direct answer to ChatGPT in the form of "Overflow AI," which was announced in July. Stack Overflow's profitability plan includes cutting costs, and that's the justification for the layoffs. Stack Overflow doubled its headcount in 2022 with 525 people. ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, making for unfortunate timing.

[... ] OpenAI is working on web crawler controls for ChatGPT, which would let sites like Stack Overflow opt out of crawling. [...] Chandrasekar has argued that sites like Stack Overflow are essential for chatbots, saying they need "to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward. They need new knowledge to be created."

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Wednesday October 18 2023, @12:36PM (2 children)

    by looorg (578) on Wednesday October 18 2023, @12:36PM (#1329257)

    "to be trained on something that's progressing knowledge forward. They need new knowledge to be created."

    Unfortunately that isn't Stack Overflow is it? They might have the quantity of data but over all the quality of their data is quite poor. Plenty of shit to go around. Just asking around or when the topic have brought up between friends and coworkers is how SO is basically a cesspool of code snippets filled with neckbeards that whine about shit and are rude or to use the new word "toxic" about it all.

    Is that their new business plan then? A quantitative common pool resource for AI harvesting? That sounds even less tempting then Copilot/Github.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday October 18 2023, @02:17PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday October 18 2023, @02:17PM (#1329278)

    They have put a fair amount of effort into moderation / ratings for questions, answers, and authors - hopefully it's good enough for their AI to sort out the toxic cesspool contents and get what the user is looking for.

    --
    🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday October 18 2023, @08:19PM

    by sjames (2882) on Wednesday October 18 2023, @08:19PM (#1329316) Journal

    My finding is that most of stack overflow is non-answers demanding readers to use google while polluting any google result with demands to use google such that you cannot find the answer or even a hint.

    They could actually make a big improvement by deleting all those just google it non-responses.