Stack Overflow is the world’s largest developer community, with more than 59 million questions and answers. By integrating human capabilities and AI advancements in our community, we aim to elevate the overall experience by providing a platform that facilitates engagement and empowers developers to achieve their goals with greater effectiveness.
Together with Stack’s strong developer community and partnerships with the world’s leading AI providers, we strive to redefine the developer experience, fostering efficiency and collaboration through the power of community, best-in-class data, and AI experiences. Our mission is to set new standards with vetted, trusted, and accurate data that will be the foundation on which technology solutions are built and delivered to our users.
With so many GenAI solutions plagued by hallucinations and misinformation, a user’s trust in data, trust in technology products, and trust in community knowledge is more crucial than ever. Pressures from within the technology community and the larger society are driving LLM developers to consider their impact on the data sources used to generate answers. This has created an urgency around data procurement that is focused on high-quality training data that is better than what is publicly available. The race by hundreds of companies to produce their own LLM models and to integrate these models into a myriad of products is driving a highly competitive environment. As LLM providers focus more on enterprise customers, the need for multiple levels of data governance is required, and corporate customers are much less accepting of lapses in accuracy and are demanding accountability for the information being provided by models.
Stack Overflow, as a company, strongly believes that the community of the world’s most engaged developers and technologists and the answers they share are what will ensure the success of AI’s future. AI needs to evolve from being a tool of developers to being a part of the community itself. AIs are more than toolsets based on data layers and more than just an “experience” layer for users. Reducing an AI into these types of silos introduces risk and increases inefficiencies because you are not maximizing the value it can truly bring to you. If, instead, individuals interacted with AIs, transparently collaborating, building, and contributing knowledge, the entire ecosystem benefits. By combining data, human experience, and community, we can more effectively support developer needs.
Stack Overflow is on a journey to build a new era in the practice of AI: the era of social responsibility.
Through our product partnerships, we search to develop and develop a virtuous cycle of data growth, discovery, and refinement for the developer group, enabling builders to seek out options extra effectively and successfully. With the intention to work with Stack Overflow at an API level, companions decide to the next:
All merchandise based mostly on fashions that devour public Stack Overflow knowledge are required to offer attribution again to the very best relevance posts that influenced the abstract given by the mannequin. With the dearth of belief being felt in AI-generated content material, it’s crucial to present credit score to the writer/subject material knowledgeable and the bigger group who created and curated the content material being shared by an LLM. This additionally ensures LLMs use essentially the most related and up-to-date info and content material, finally presenting the Rosetta Stone wanted by a mannequin to construct belief in sources and ensuing selections. Sharing credit score ties to attribution and with attribution—belief is on the coronary heart.
The most effective content material has a human at its core. GenAI can solely reply with what has already been revealed, it received’t present any knowledge or insightful suggestions on something created after its final knowledge ingestion. What does a human element present? People present up-to-date info, determine patterns early on, and add alerts across the social worth of data inside a group, offering context to the content material. As such, questions on Stack Overflow (whether or not by a group member or assisted and curated by AI) are posted solely after human assessment. As well as, group solutions ought to be derived from high quality, correct, sourced knowledge. This stuff will finally present the chance for LLM merchandise to work together with the group straight, elevating their coaching and reconfirming their sourced knowledge by way of human interplay.
The 2-way communication loop is as necessary as ever. Whether or not it’s a tech software or the particular person standing in entrance of you—nobody likes being spoken to, we want an open dialogue. In working with GenAI, like some other course of or significant dialog, or studying expertise—solely by way of suggestions and clear dialogue can we count on this know-how to enhance and profit its person base. Neighborhood platforms that gas LLMs ought to be acknowledged for his or her contributions so that they proceed to see the worth each human and AI counterparts carry to bigger communities. In return, group suggestions can present extra environment friendly and efficient methods to construct and enhance fashions.
We imagine {that a} group can play a vital function in how AI accelerates, finally serving to with the standard popping out of the AI choices. Stack Overflow’s function is to carry the facility of the developer group and the technological energy of AI collectively.
AI-powered code mills ought to assist builders spend much less time writing boilerplate and repetitive code, to allow them to deal with fixing extra complicated issues. Whereas GenAI instruments can complement the sources accessible to builders, solely Stack Overflow’s group experience with correct and sourced content material enhances these instruments and is a useful useful resource for coding groups. Our holistic ‘higher collectively’ developer strategy of group + AI permits your staff to:
- Speed up the code writing course of, making builders extra productive whereas guaranteeing they comply with greatest practices surrounding code.
- Guarantee code makes it to manufacturing extra shortly. When code is created appropriately the primary time, code assessment and CI are much less painful.
Our north star is providing a real collaboration between the person, AIs, and a world group—working in unison to unravel issues, save time/frustration for builders, and velocity up innovation responsibly.
Proceed to go to Stack Overflow Labs, our hub for innovation and experimentation, for additional updates and particulars as we construct out our roadmap and share insights into what’s coming subsequent on this new journey in AI.
