Stack Overflow CEO: Generative AI will lead to an explosion of developers

Stack Overflow CEO: Generative AI will lead to an explosion of developers.

In a recent interview with media VentureBeat , Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar focused on his optimistic view of the explosive growth of generative AI.

He revealed that Stack Overflow will release a set of generative AI tools later this summer, and the company is currently investing 10% of its employees in developing the tools.

“There’s no escaping the question of how we use this technology to achieve our mission of helping build technology through collective knowledge.

The intersection of the power of community on one side and artificial intelligence on the other – from my perspective From the looks of it, human-generated community content has brought us to where we are today, we have a lot of impact, but we also have a lot of problems that can be solved by leveraging this technology.”

While ChatGPT’s traffic has grown exponentially, Stack Overflow’s visits have been steadily declining, with the platform’s traffic down nearly 14% year-on-year in March this year, according to the data .

The Stack Overflow 2023 annual report also pointed out that generative AI chatbot tools have had a significant impact on developers.

A whopping 83% of respondents said they had used ChatGPT in the past year, while GitHub Copilot was named the most-used AI development tool.

Chandrasekar explained that Stack Overflow will integrate generative AI on the public website and its enterprise product , Stack Overflow for Teams . “We want to do this in a responsible and safe way and have the right use cases to solve specific user and customer problems. This is going to be very, very exciting and I can’t wait for the world to know and Let our community use what we’re about to announce.”

He believes that generative AI will not lead to the replacement of human programmers and layoffs; instead, the number of software developers will explode. “According to our own data set, there are about 30 million official developers, but this number will probably at least triple.” And emphasized that developers who do not adopt the new generation of AI tools will be left behind by the times.

It is worth mentioning that Stack Overflow had a policy in December last year that prohibited the use of ChatGPT on the site.

This resulted in the removal of thousands of posts and the suspension of hundreds of users for violating the policy. But at the end of May, the company reversed course and instituted a new policy that requires moderators to provide rigorous evidence to determine whether a post was created by AI before banning a user.

In early June, Stack Overflow’s volunteer moderators announced they were going on strike because the company’s new AI content policy could cause chatbots to hallucinate, creating misinformation.

In response, Chandrasekar said that the decision to ban ChatGPT last December was “the right decision.” But now the company has gradually partnered with the community, conducting research and getting input. “From a Stack Overflow perspective, we’ve gotten feedback on how best to ensure we’re going to trust AI-generated products, and that’s what we’ll be announcing in about a month’s time.”

He also said that currently tools like ChatGPT still produce many false negative results, that is, some comments are wrongly marked as AI-generated, and normal users are mistakenly expelled.

But due to the nature of current AI tools, AI-generated content is difficult to accurately weed out.

So the decision to create a new AI policy “wasn’t an easy one by any means – but we think the cost of stopping people from asking questions on Stack Overflow is too high. According to our analysis, this is happening at a surprisingly high rate .”

Previously, the company also announced that it would charge AI technology giants for the data used to train AI models. “We’ve always wanted to make our data open and freely available to the developer community. However, for the big AI companies that are building models — we definitely want to work with them in a more formal way.”