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Stack Overflow, the 15-year-old internet establishment for programmers that’s famous for its boards the place thorny coding questions are answered by the web site’s neighborhood, is shedding 28% of its workforce, CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar introduced at the moment.
The corporate didn’t specify precisely how a lot of its headcount could be impacted, however its LinkedIn page signifies it has between 501-1,000 workers, and 769 on LinkedIn, so presumably round 215 individuals.
In a brief blog post, Chandrasekar mentioned that “this yr we took many steps to spend much less,” with out elaborating on what these steps have been, however that “Sadly, these modifications weren’t sufficient.”
Chandrasekar additionally cited “ongoing threats to buyer budgets shifting because of the macroeconomic pressures impacting your complete tech trade. ”
What impression did ChatGPT and Github Copilot have?
Whereas Chandrasekar, nor a spokesperson reached by VentureBeat, elaborated on what different pressures may be going through the corporate, observers on X (previously Twitter) have been fast to level the finger to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the chatbot based mostly on its massive language mannequin (LLM) GPT-3.5 and GPT-4/V.
OpenAI additionally makes Codex, a programming particular LLM based mostly on GPT however educated on code snippets and designed to assist software program builders generate and full code.
Laura Wendel, a startup founder between London and Germany, posted that “This can be the primary massive layoff immediately because of AI,” and cited “folks asking ChatGPT as an alternative of Stack Overflow” for solutions to their questions, posting a graph exhibiting a precipitous decline in Stack Overflow web page views starting in April 2023, when the chatbot was gaining public momentum.
Earlier in the summertime, in June 2023, Google DeepMind researcher Mahesh Sathiamoorthy published a similar graph on X additionally exhibiting a collapse in Stack Overflow visitors of about 50%.
On the time, fellow Googler François Chollet opined on Sathiamoorthy’s post that Microsfot’s “GitHub Copilot and LLM chatbots are inflicting an enormous drop in StackOverflow visitors. What’s fascinating about it’s that these methods work largely due to the user-generated content material from StackOverflow. Is that this suggestions loop sustainable?”
The massive query: how is Overflow AI doing?
In July, only a month after this submit and change, Stack Overflow introduced its personal developer instrument LLM chatbot product, OverflowAI, that’s educated on the corpus of the Stack Overflow public data base.
In Chandrasekar’s weblog submit, he praised his groups’ “monumental efforts to efficiently launch OverflowAI.”
Nonetheless, the corporate has not shared a lot in the best way of metrics about how that resolution is doing by way of uptake. However with competing options on the market and already having fun with immense utilization, it’s clear that the generative AI age has not been a straightforward one for Stack Overflow to this point.