After ChatGPT disruption, Stack Overflow lays off 28 percent of staff::The popular developer forum is still hunting for a “path to profitability.”
Great. So once Stack Overflow is dead, where will ChatGPT get actual, correct answers from?
Comment Closed: Duplicate Post
See other comment about different company going out of business for totally different reason.
Perfectly toxic, as all stack overflow comments should be.
They also went out of business 10 years ago and the market has changed since then.
An actual problem to worry about too. I think there will always be people looking to contribute but as less people do AI may actually get dumber until they figure out how to train AI with AI
until they figure out how to train AI with AI
That won’t work because machine learning doesn’t actually understand what it says. It needs real human knowledge underlying it. It can’t just learn things on its own out of nowhere.
That sounds exactly like what an AI, that was trained by another AI, would say to assuage our fears of General Artificial Intelligence. Nice try.
US Robotics would like to give you the first robot for free. It’s Three Laws safe! We swear!
Wait… am I an AI?
But maybe if we sacrifice enough ecosystems we could get it to work and then ask it to solve all the climate problems we created to power it…
That’s true for general purpose LLMs, but there are other contexts in which machine learning models acquire knowledge without continuous human input, e.g. AlphaZero.
Ok but how does it incorporate wisdom in it’s output? Or discern truth from lie?
Are you honestly playing the “It isn’t as smart and special as a human being” in a thread about stack overflow? Where the answer to the vast majority of questions is:
- An insult about not using search correctly and this being a duplicate
- Outdated
- Outright wrong AND argumentative
Also: There is a reason Microsoft bought Github. And you can bet that Atlassian and Gitlab are shopping around for buyers.
Ahh wtf, Microsoft bought GitHub? God damnit, monopolies are so out of control.
its been quite a while too, they have been training ai to replace programmers using code from there lol
I mean, the AI can memorize the programming documentation, sweep different github repositories, and the programming itself is already learned behavior.
That’s for programming. As for fault finding, that might get more challenging for the AI without stack overflow.
I’ve seen so far on Leemy today that a bunch of people have been laid off from Bandcamp, Stack Overflow and Linked In. What the shit. Did the industry just decide to shrink today or something
I’m afraid I don’t have any good sources to back this up, but I’ve seen it said multiple times in other threads on similar layoffs that investment capital has dried up in tech, investors are starting to demand a return, which leads to companies doing layoffs to cut costs etc. I’m sure smarter people can come along and explain it better (if they so choose).
It’s a result of the cheap (and during the pandemic, literally “free”) borrowing hayday of the last few years being over (they ended around 2022, when the Fed started jacking up interest rates and banks had to also increase rates in order to cover their loaned to liquidity ratios as required by law). As such, investors and businesses can’t just borrow a shitload of money cheaply, so what they choose to invest in is much more conservative and/or the ROI tantalizing.
Also, in my opinion, the frenzy to dump millions into tech is mostly kind of over. The big dogs have gobbled up all the promising start-ups and potential disruptors and then some. AI is the “new” hotness, but all the companies that really have immediately viable products/services are already heavily invested in. There isn’t really anything that’s poised to come in and become the next OpenAI that’s not already owned by the bigger companies.
Lastly, due to the first thing I mentioned, many folks believe we’re A) already in a recession or B) about to enter one in earnest. In either scenarios, investors tend to pull their funds into safer pots while they ride out bumpy economic waters.
Unemployment is low, wages are finally outstripping inflation, inflation is falling and there is huge investment in factories and infrastructure.
It doesn’t appear that a recession is on it’s way but rather the free money that was flowing into the IT sector is causing all these companies to become profitable fast.
Thus the lay-offs.
It’s not always as simple as that, though.
https://fortune.com/2023/10/01/recession-still-likely-and-coming-soon-6-reasons-why/
And one that agrees with you:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/with-gallic-shrug-fed-bids-adieu-recession-that-wasnt-2023-08-16/
The truth of the matter? No one really knows. Large economies are very difficult to forecast reliably and consistently. I hope you’re right and it’s all continual growth for the next couple of years, at the very least. But, like the first article I linked mentions, fed hikes can have a 18-24 month lag time to see real world impacts on various industries and we’re soon approaching the first of that timeframe.
The rich have way too much cash and desperately want another recession so they can buy cheap assets. Consumers, the overall job market etc. Are trending the other way and messing up the cycle of boom/bust. In this particular instance, I am fine with the layoffs… as long as they keep paying the people they laid off. Paying people whose jobs are automated should have started at least as early as the industrial revolution.
The rich have way too much cash and desperately want another recession
Exactly. We’ve been hearing “there’s a recession coming, any minute now!” for YEARS, and yet every jobs report shows the economy is doing gangbusters.
Q3 just ended. These layoffs are because the books are not looking good. Everyone is hurting with inflation and higher interest, tech being particularly vulnerable to high interest rates.
I can only hope the execs cut correctly. A second round of layoffs at a company can destroy morale enough to sink the company. Who wants to continue working at a place that fired your close peers, wondering if you’re next?
You can already tell they didn’t cut correctly, as they didn’t cut themselves.
Why is tech particular vulnerable to high interest rates?
Right? How is Machinima doing these days? They were once the biggest YouTube channel in all of esports. They had a few rounds of layoffs back between 2010 and 2013. Closed up in 2019. I mean it was more than morale, but it was writing on the wall.
The whole year. Companies who lied off (meta, google, Microsoft) and did stock buybacks had a huge boost on the market.
Stock market is demanding layoffs, from even before chatgpt took over. That’s it. AI is just another keyword to push market price even further
Can’t get that quarterly bonus without showing “growth”.
do you imply that the best economic system ever imagined by humans is not sustainable?
Who woulda thunk!?
You’ll always see the stories of popular companies doing layoffs.
But you rarely hear stories of tech companies going on massive hiring sprees. Because those stories don’t get clicks.
i want to see who will pay for their garbage when no one has a job
I can also ask basic, repetitive questions framed exactly to my use case without getting yelled at that the question has been asked and answered before.
and then be provided with a solution of a 10 years old tech that is barely applicable today. But if you read all the answers you may find an up to date suggestion in the comments of a non-accepted answer.
But if you read all the answers you may find an up to date suggestion in the comments of a non-accepted answer.
Honestly this is not bad, if it solves your problem and it took less than 10 minutes of reading overall.
Plus you gain some understanding along the way, about why the other answers aren’t going to solve your problem, which is also valuable.
I’m not against learning or understanding the nature of the issue so that I’m in position to form a correct solution. But I find it kinda funny that topics are locked with “duplicate”, and the question linked has for example an accepted answer written in PHP5. I believe that SO should invent a way that such cases can be updated without the current “hacks”. Now, even if somebody puts the effort to write an up-to-date answer, it will be at the end of answers and it will take a lot of time, if ever, to reach a higher position. Also the “accepted” answer will always be the old one.
Another issue is that in some cases, the accepted answer becomes a wiki. Edit upon edit by users with required reputation adding new up-to-date info. In the end the answer is nothing close to what the original answer was, but it keeps the originally acquired score. So it can reach to a case that you see a +100 upvoted answer, which in fact has only been proof-read by 2-3 people, the ones that are needed to accept the edited answer.
The answers on SO are from unpaid contributors.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
While no chatbot is 100 percent reliable, code has the unique ability to be instantly verified by just testing it in your IDE (integrated development environment), which makes it an ideal use case for chatbots.
Today, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar announced Stack Overflow is laying off 28 percent of its staff.
Of course, the great irony of ChatGPT hurting Stack Overflow is that a great deal of the chatbot’s development prowess comes from scraping sites like Stack Overflow.
OpenAI is working on web crawler controls for ChatGPT, which would let sites like Stack Overflow opt out of crawling.
As we’ve seen with chatbots convincing each other that you can “melt eggs,” 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.
The original article contains 276 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 39%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
As we’ve seen with chatbots convincing each other that you can “melt eggs,” 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.
Or, you know, fact check before you feed it to the AI. You don’t tell a child ‘go google it’ to everything and hope it somehow works out, right? “But then AI could never be profitable!” Oh the irony.
Btw, would a common language model be possible?
