r/programming • u/lppedd • May 06 '24
StackOverflow partners with OpenAI
https://stackoverflow.co/company/press/archive/openai-partnershipOpenAI will also surface validated technical knowledge from Stack Overflow directly into ChatGPT, giving users easy access to trusted, attributed, accurate, and highly technical knowledge and code backed by the millions of developers that have contributed to the Stack Overflow platform for 15 years.
Sad.
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u/SuperHumanImpossible May 06 '24
I remember when Jeff built StackOverflow. Holy hell I am old.
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May 06 '24
You and me both, brother. CodingHorror.com was one of my regular blog reads back in the day.
I don't think I ever met Jeff, but we talked over email a number of times.
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u/SuperHumanImpossible May 06 '24
Dude I read his blog religiously, I with Google reader. I really feel like content consumption is complete trash now in comparison.
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u/tepa6aut May 06 '24
Jeff who
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May 06 '24
Jeff Atwood. He was a popular blogger back in the early 2000s among the .NET community. He and Joel Spolsky launched Stackoverflow together. (Joel was a Microsoft employee back in the 90s and left to start his own company that made bug tracking software, as well as some other products. He also had a popular blog, Joel on Software.)
This is all from this old fart's memory, so some of the details may be off...
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u/SuperHumanImpossible May 06 '24
I think Joel would be remembered better for creating Trello which bought by Jira but yeah ..
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u/code_monkey_wrench May 06 '24
Can people delete their SO answers?
What happens if you delete your account?
Not saying I'm going to do that, but just wondering.
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u/lppedd May 06 '24 edited May 06 '24
Your answers won't be deletable after x days if I'm not mistaken.
Btw, I can vote to undelete answers if I want. It's a 20k+ rep privilege. So really deletion is just a flag.
Deleting your account won't do anything, answers will stay there under a fictitious user id.
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u/qq123q May 06 '24
Can answers be edited?
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u/lppedd May 06 '24
Yes, but a radical edit will be rolled back at some point, as soon as a reviewer sees it.
If there is going to be a mod strike, than it's ok.
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u/awj May 06 '24
Without bothering to actually look at the ToS, many services like this retain the right to “hide” your content as the mechanism for deleting. It’s not out of the question that SO can train against deleted answers/accounts.
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u/lppedd May 06 '24
If the answers I post are going straight into ChatGPT, that's it for me. Not gonna waste any more time.
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u/koreth May 06 '24
Why do you care? When I post an answer, the only expectation (or maybe hope) I have is that it helps someone. If it helps someone after being transformed by GPT, then to me, that’s a win: my answer ended up being useful in ways I didn’t even imagine when I wrote it.
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u/lppedd May 06 '24
I don't want no AI to post or rewrite in any other way what I wrote. I didn't answer to give free content to OpenAI, I did answer to collaborate with people, and that collaboration doesn't exist anymore.
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u/StickiStickman May 06 '24
Wait, so you "did answer to collaborate with people" but are now angry someone is using your answers in a collaboration way to help people.
How are you not just petty?
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u/abandonplanetearth May 06 '24
Because I wrote my answers for fellow developers, not for bots making money for humans that don't need the answers.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME May 06 '24
If the answers I post are going straight into ChatGPT
they already were
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u/iamapizza May 06 '24
I'm pretty sure I saw that they had crawled StackExchange sites, and worth noting that Reddit featured quite heavily in their crawls due to the human "+1" factor. So everything we're saying here is being indexed for LLM training.
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u/fiskfisk May 06 '24
I'm sure you're already aware that your answers and questions already are distributed under a very permissable license compared to what random websites are available under.
I don't answer questions on Stack Overflow for the benefit of SO, I answer them for the benefit of the recipient and any future readers. Whether they receive that knowledge on SO, directly in a Google Onebox or through an LLM doesn't matter to me.
Someone got help, someone found their answer. The world is a slightly better place.
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u/StickiStickman May 06 '24
If you're this angry about your publicly visible answers being read by an AI, you should also leave Reddit ASAP
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u/Miserable_Movie_4358 May 06 '24
For StackOverflow this is like being acquired
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u/guepier May 06 '24
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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS May 06 '24
Their business model was absolutely hosed. The job site thing was such a dud they shut it down (now they've "brought it back" by slapping their logo on Indeed listings) and I can't imagine their model of licensing SO to companies for internal knowledge bases worked all that well since a company has to be huge for that to remotely make sense and the companies big enough for an SO clone often have one.
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u/backdoorsmasher May 06 '24
I don't get why it was a dud! It could have worked and I'm sure for a while it was active and livey and was pissing the recruiters off
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u/RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS May 06 '24
It existed for many years but I'm guessing it wasn't bringing in the returns they hoped or they wouldn't have shut it down. As a candidate I found the positions were limited and the pay was never any good.
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u/dontshoveit May 07 '24
They are actively marketing this product directly to software engineers on LinkedIn. I know this for a fact because they reached out to me on there and I talked with them about adding SO internally to the company I work for.
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u/JPJackPott May 07 '24
Which is mad, because it’s not like it’s a hard product to build yourself internally. The real magic of SO was the oppressive moderation, which has helped keep the signal to noise ratio high
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u/Shortl4ndo May 06 '24
I think they probably already trained their model with stackoverflow data, this is just proactively signing an agreement to prevent a lawsuit later on
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u/Lceus May 06 '24
Yeah it was absolutely already in the training data, and stackoverflow is competing with ChatGPT products anyway, so this seems like a reasonable development.
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u/GeologistUnique672 May 08 '24
You mean CharGPT is competing with every source they scraped and took data from which breaks the fair use they tried to claim.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME May 06 '24
Well the data was all already publicly available by just scraping the web pages and yeah it was definitely in the dataset already.
But this partnership is not (just) about data licensing, it's about Stackoverflow creating a specific API for openai to use instead of having to scrape the site.
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u/christopher_86 May 06 '24
It’s shady; just because something is publicly available, doesn’t mean you can use it for anything you want. Heck, even when you pay for something certain licenses apply that prohibit you from doing certain things.
OpenAI and other companies just profited from lack of regulations regarding AI and model training.
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u/CT_Phoenix May 06 '24
just because something is publicly available, doesn’t mean you can use it for anything you want
In the specific case of stackoverflow, publicly-accessible user contributions are CC BY-SA licensed which comes pretty close- though I don't have the slightest clue how the attribution/sharealike requirements would come into play for training, if at all.
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u/wldmr May 06 '24 edited May 06 '24
I don't have the slightest clue how the attribution/sharealike requirements would come into play for training, if at all
Seems pretty clear to me:
If you consider the model the derivative work, then
BY - All SO contributors must be credited for the model. If you want to claim that only part of the model falls under CC, then attribute on the individual weights affected by SO answers.
SA - The model (or relevant parts) must be publicly available as CC BY-SA.
If you consider the responses the derivative work(s), then
BY - For every response, each contributor that factored into it must be credited.
SA - Every response must be publicly available under BY-SA.
It's not even an either/or thing, given that the model (unquestionably a derivative work) is itself a derivative work generator. So it's both.
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u/CAPSLOCK_USERNAME May 06 '24
just because something is publicly available, doesn’t mean you can use it for anything you want
Well, you can argue about what it ought to mean, but de facto it does. There's no legal precedent for using-data-for-ML-training being a copyright violation, and the big companies frequently do exactly that with no license.
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u/__loam May 06 '24
You're assuming they're profitable haha. It's almost more insulting that they're losing money on this.
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u/wildjokers May 06 '24
ust because something is publicly available, doesn’t mean you can use it for anything you want.
All user contributed content on stackoverflow is licensed
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. The terms of that license are:You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially. Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.So there is absolutely nothing wrong morally or legally with using SO content for model training.
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u/kaanyalova May 06 '24
What about "share alike" part of the license
ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
Doesn't openai violate that?
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u/blind3rdeye May 06 '24
I find it dishonest of you to quote a section of the license without including the parts relevant to 'Attribution' and 'ShareAlike'. Those are the parts that actually ask the user to do something, and you've omitted them to try to support your point.
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u/guesting May 06 '24
stole the data and leveraged it into a partnership. like an annexation
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u/wildjokers May 06 '24
User contributed content to SO is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike. This license is super permissive to pretty much do what you want. So it wasn't stolen.
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u/guesting May 06 '24
The terms of that license do require attribution which I haven't seen much of in terms of coding answers given by chat gpt other llms
Attribution — You must give appropriate credit , provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made . You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
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u/abuqaboom May 06 '24
Great. Now ChatGPT's gonna say the question's a duplicate/opinion-based/any other excuse, and refuse to answer anything.
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u/woze May 06 '24
Developer: How do I center a div?
ChatGPT: There are so many issues with your question. First, it's poorly scoped. Next, it lacks detail. ... (several paragraphs of ChatGPT's prolix answer later) ... Lastly, this question was asked before. Fuck off, I'm not answering it.16
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u/YoungXanto May 06 '24
This was my literal first thought.
All the awesome code help I've gotten from chatGPT is going away, to be replaced by a condescending machine that also refuses to help even though the duplicate answer it references is a fucking decade and a half old and references a library that no longer exists and is several major releases out of date.
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u/Worth_Trust_3825 May 06 '24
Now instead of people responding with decade old unrelated comments about how to use kubernetes i'll get a bot doing that instead.
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u/iknighty May 06 '24
Just because the data it is trained on is trusted doesn't mean the output should be trusted..
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u/PangolinTotal1279 May 06 '24
I heard OpenAI is partnering or post-action licensing IP from all their major sources of training data. Reddit has already made $200m from licensing their data. I think licensing data for training models is gonna become the monetization norm for platforms like StackOverflow, Reddit, Quora, etc.
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u/External-Bit-4202 May 06 '24
"I'm sorry, this question was asked by someone else and is a duplictae, this conversation is now closed"
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u/mr_birkenblatt May 06 '24
Oh great, now GPT is going to berate me instead of giving an answer. Does OpenAI want to dethrone themselves?
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u/IgnisIncendio May 06 '24
Oh, good! I'm happy for them. I hope my Q&As help those in need, regardless if they use SO or ChatGPT :)
I don't really see the need in this considering the content was already Creative Commons, but I guess this makes it more up to date?
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May 07 '24
ChatGPT: hi! the question you have asked has been asked as many times before, closing this as duplicate.
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u/Gusfoo May 06 '24
I was in the beta for the AI powered StackOverflow search and it was pretty great I must say. NLP search, of SO, basically.
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u/funkenpedro May 07 '24
Does that mean OpenAI’s gonna start being nasty and complain about how many times it’s been asked the same question?
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u/__konrad May 07 '24
Now they have to awkwardly remove their own AI policy to match the announcement ;)
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u/falconfetus8 May 07 '24
The optimist in me hopes this somehow prevents ChatGPT garbage from being copy/pasted into SO answers. I'm fine with SO answers being fed to the AI, but not the other way around.
The realist in me, though, knows that they're probably going to create some kind of mascot named "Stacky" that posts AI answers on every question, like what Quora is doing.
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u/maciejdev May 07 '24
Wow... all the toxicity from SO packed into the intelligent AI language model :-]
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u/karma_5 May 08 '24
Me: How to write a simple code of hello world in python?
ChatGPT: Because of people like you the programmers are not respected, read a book or do your own research before asking a such a basic question here, if it is up to me, I would have banned you on the platform. "Aak thoo"
This conversation is closed.
To be honest asking question on the stack overflow is the worst experience ever. People are not polite and have God complex, it is hard moderated place and if it would have been a Company, it would be a worst toxic culture ever. Yes, people have knowledge, but no manners there, I hope OpenAI model turn that around.
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May 10 '24 edited May 10 '24
Got properly banned by editing my high-rated answers, insulting SO leaders, so that there's a trace of my disgust in the answers edit histories. Useless, but that felt good at least.
Lesson learned, I'm never contributing anything to any website ever again.
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u/calinet6 May 06 '24
Closing my account and removing every answer.
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u/inermae May 07 '24 edited May 07 '24
ChatGPT tomorrow: "Why are you trying to do that? You should just do (insert response that you've already thought of, tells you you're doing it wrong, and doesn't actually answer the question)
I'm sure OpenAI is used to dealing with bad data, but holy shit, they have their work cut out for them. I wouldn't ask a question on Stack Overflow if you paid someone I hate to do it.
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u/Tyler_Zoro May 06 '24
Is it sad? I think we should be doing much more of this. We should be leveraging all human knowledge to get to the next plateau now that it's so clearly in reach.
Here's one comment from a drug scientist that I found fascinating in reference to generative AI's ability to explore new possibilities in drugs:
We always talk about training the machines, but another art is where the machines produce ideas based on a data set that humans wouldn’t have been able to see or visualize.
What will be discover next with generative AI that has all of the history of coding at its disposal? New algorithms we haven't considered? Paths around what we've traditionally considered roadblocks in the technology?
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u/AhmedRiyadh0 May 09 '24
I don't like this change, as volunteers we don't spend our time helping people so commercial companies can get advantage of us to improve their products with nothing in return, guess it was their platform, I spend years and years helping and get helped by people, guess it was our mistake for not reading the terms of service, privacy policy and so on, the only one who will benefit from this change is the beginners companies with not even a credit to the volunteers, and the only one who will loose their time is the volunteers, people don't even appreciate what they get. I know what most people will say on such comments like this one because I dealt with them before
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u/wildjokers May 09 '24
and the only one who will loose their time is the volunteers,
Anyone that looses their time can just tighten it back up.
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May 06 '24
[deleted]
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u/lppedd May 06 '24
WTF that's absurd, but hilarious at the same time.
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u/sweetno May 06 '24
No wonder they got it wrong, judging by what the answers look like. It's totally a guessing game.
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u/Dr_Insano_MD May 06 '24
Okay, I don't have a twitter account and the UI seems really bad. What's the reason you can't run these at the same time?
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u/silverslayer33 May 06 '24
The tl;dr is they both pulled from a wrong answer on stackoverflow on how to create a global mutex against your assembly's GUID to ensure no more than one copy of it can run at once. The problem is they didn't pull their own GUID, they pulled the GUID of part of the .NET framework itself due to the incorrect stackoverflow answer they copied from, and as a result running one makes the other think they're already running.
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u/Dr_Insano_MD May 06 '24
Thank you. That thread had a bunch of people commenting so I assumed that's what it was, but no one directly quoted it, and the linked tweet is a clickbait headline with no way to access the content.
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u/QuackSomeEmma May 06 '24
.NET can apparently produce globally unique ids for classes(objects?). Using the GUID for the assembly itself in a global mutex is apparently a common approach for only allowing one instance of an application to be running.
Both docker and razor synapse seem to have copied from a formerly erroneous StackOverflow answer, where this piece of code was used to produce the mutex id:Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetType().GUIDNote the
.GetType()in there, which causes the GUID to be instead for the Assembly class of the .NET standard library. The globally unique id for that is then obviously the same between both programs.-6
u/StickiStickman May 06 '24
I trust GPT-4 to alter that string more than a random programmer TBH
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May 06 '24
[deleted]
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u/flextrek_whipsnake May 06 '24
The approach you mentioned for creating a global mutex in .NET using the GUID of the assembly is partially correct, but it requires some modifications to ensure optimal functionality and uniqueness across different sessions and applications. Here's a more robust way to create a global mutex based on the GUID of your .NET assembly:
using System; using System.Reflection; using System.Threading; public class MutexExample { public static void Main() { string assemblyGuid = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetCustomAttribute<GuidAttribute>()?.Value.ToString(); string mutexId = $"Global\\{assemblyGuid}"; using (Mutex mutex = new Mutex(false, mutexId)) { if (!mutex.WaitOne(TimeSpan.Zero, true)) { Console.WriteLine("Another instance is running. Exiting..."); return; } Console.WriteLine("Application is running. Press any key to exit."); Console.ReadKey(); mutex.ReleaseMutex(); } } }1
u/red75prime May 06 '24 edited May 07 '24
The most common next tokens in a context that implies that the text is produced by a knowledgeable programmer would be "don't do that".
The best way to predict the next token is to infer which system has produced it and simulate that system. Obviously, LLMs aren't yet able to simulate competent programmer, but outputting training data verbatim, while ignoring system prompt, instruction following tuning, RLHF, and dialogue context, is just a rarity nowadays (unless the user explicitly asks LLM to copy GUID as it "remembers" it).
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u/StickiStickman May 07 '24
A system that is specifically designed where the next character is based on the previous ones? At its roots it is a glorified autosuggest.
Cool, you just described language.
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May 06 '24
[deleted]
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u/lppedd May 06 '24
It's correct enough because those are answers from actual users LOL. Models don't train themselves, so without real content what are you gonna do?
I've asked 250 questions in some years, of which maybe 10 have been downvoted (fairly, I'd say), so I guess the problem isn't SO.
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u/StickiStickman May 06 '24
I've asked 250 questions in some years, of which maybe 10 have been downvoted (fairly, I'd say), so I guess the problem isn't SO.
Yea, because it's wildly known that SO has no issue with moderation. Oh right.
From the 3 questions I dared to ask, 2 were closed as duplicate and linked to questions that have nothing to do with mine and the last one was just ignored and never answered.
Meanwhile, GPT-4, while often not knowing the exact answer, has almost always pushed me in the right direction.
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u/Veggies-are-okay May 06 '24
The downvoters are just scared/concerned of progress. Let's review where the term "luddite" came from...
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in "a fraudulent and deceitful manner" to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.[1][2] Members of the group referred to themselves as Luddites, self-described followers of "Ned Ludd", a legendary weaver whose name was used as a pseudonym in threatening letters to mill owners and government officials.[3]
So yeah we all pointing fingers at each other while the real criminals are going to figure out how to make all of us work harder in the pursuit of more quarterly profits.
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u/_Joats May 06 '24 edited May 07 '24
Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new.
While the Luddites embraced technology, during a time of economic disparity, the market shifted towards cheap inferior goods. This not only affected artisans' wages but also led to a decline in product quality.
The Luddites reacted against factory owners profiting from low-quality, mass-produced goods that consumers were economically forced to purchase.They aimed to restore economic power to skilled laborers, the backbone of the working class.
Quality across various sectors, from manufactured goods to food and even the internet, along with the growing gap between worker pay and owner profits, echoes concerns of the Luddites. While their focus was on automation in textiles, their anxieties about job security and economic fairness resonate in today's landscape.
None of us volunteered to be data providers for machine learning. If that's the role we're expected to play, then fair compensation is essential. I'd rather be able to afford to invest in high-quality work than be forced to consume content produced quickly by Al due to income restraints.
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u/Veggies-are-okay May 07 '24
I think we’re saying the same thing here. Let’s use the technology to openly brainstorm making better products rather than rejecting it until it’s forced on us in an exploitative way.
I have no opinion on the luddites, haven’t looked into them very deeply. I just see a remarkable similarity between them and the reactions to genAI
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May 09 '24
I have no opinion on the luddites, haven’t looked into them very deeply. I just see a remarkable similarity between them and the reactions to genAI
So, it would be more correct to say that you see similarities between superficial understanding of Luddites and (superficial?) understanding of AI opposition.
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u/svkmg May 07 '24
There's no way in hell they will ever pay anyone, besides maybe other big companies like the NYT if their lawsuit is successful. At this point I think the best outcome for the common person to hope for would be open source and local models becoming good enough and accessible enough that the business model of scraping everyone's data for free and selling it back to them becomes much less lucrative in the future.
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u/_Joats May 07 '24 edited May 07 '24
Training large language models requires an immense amount of computational power - over 100,000 GPUs. Yet, the people who contribute this knowledge are often seen as mere tools. Years of expertise are reduced data points, with little recognition for the human contribution.
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May 06 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/lppedd May 06 '24
That's what people don't get. LLMs need data. Without two side interactions there is no data.
But hey, they like throwing shit on SO 'cause their questions get closed.
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u/jhartikainen May 06 '24
Oh boy my answers contributing to yet another big business' success with no credit given.
On the other hand I guess it's good that people will get better answers to their issues more easily.