OpenAI is collaborating with Stack Overflow, the Q&A forum for software developers, to improve its generative AI models’ performance on programming-related tasks. As a result of the partnership, announced Monday, OpenAI’s models, including models served through its ChatGPT chatbot platform, should get better over time at answering programming-related questions, the two companies say. At the same time, Stack Overflow will benefit from OpenAI’s expertise in developing new generative AI integrations on the Stack Overflow platform.The first set of features will go live by the end of June. The tie-up with OpenAI is a remarkable reversal for Stack Overflow, which initially banned responses from ChatGPT on its platform over fears of spammy responses. Stack Overflow began experimenting with generative AI features last April, promising to craft models that “reward” devs who contribute knowledge to the platform. In July, the company launched a conversational search tool that lets users pose queries and receive answers based on Stack Overflow’s database of over 58 million questions and answers, along with tools for businesses to fine-tune searches on their own documentation and knowledge bases. Some members of Stack Overflow’s developer community rebelled against the changes, pointing out concerns related to the validity of information generated by AI, information overload, and data privacy for individual contributors on the platform. There was at least some basis for those concerns. An analysis of more than 150 million lines of code committed to project repos over the past several years by GitClear found that generative AI dev tools are resulting in more mistaken code being pushed to codebases. Elsewhere, security researchers have warned that such tools can amplify existing bugs and security issues in software projects.
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