Dear Stack Overflow denizens, thanks for helping train OpenAI's billion-dollar LLMs
Stack Overflow, a community-driven Q&A site, and OpenAI, maker of AI models, have agreed to work to improve each other's products, the latest deal in a series of tie-ups to feed machine learning models' thirst for data.
The two organizations characterized the partnership on Monday as a way to "strengthen the world's most popular large language models," by which they mean OpenAI's.
The pact, which follows a similar Stack Overflow snuggle with Google Cloud, may also strengthen the developer site's business prospects by ensuring it receives some consideration from OpenAI for the super lab's scraping of advice of the Stack Overflow community.
We also presume these agreements are in place to head off any copyright or other legal brouhaha with the forum super-site. Stack Overflow content tends to show up a lot in LLM training datasets, including those used by OpenAI. Rather than scrape the Q&A website for content, OpenAI (like Google) can now directly extract that info from a dedicated API, it seems.
As to how generative AI will make things better for Stack Overflow visitors seeking help, that's not entirely clear. As Pulumi's recent experience with AI Answers has shown, not everyone welcomes machine-generated content.
