upvote
It's training on every single codebase in the world instead now

You prompt it to fix the mistakes it made and that goes into the new training data

reply
More importantly, the newer generation of models don't even need Stackoverflow. With tool calling they can pull up as much documentation and source code as you could possibly want, and in the past year they've become alarmingly good at piecing those things together to solve problems.

It's less efficient than being able to point to a canonical answer on a widely respected forum, yes. And it sucks immensely to have to rely on these horrible AI companies to replace the real human interactions that getting work done used to require, yes. But realistically, we are not looking at some kind of model collapse anytime soon due to lack of SO threads.

Losing Reddit and blogs and other forums is going to be a bigger problem. In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use? How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice? if the web becomes a ghost town and nobody is talking about anything anymore, there's no form thread it can uncover and say "that's the one everyone uses". Losing the library of technical Q&A is nothing close to the catastrophe of losing actual conversations between humans.

reply
In two years from now, if I ask GPT-8 or whatever to build me a Web server, what web framework is it going to use?

My guess is, you won't care.

How will it and/or I know which one is a good choice?

My guess is, it will make a good choice.

reply
deleted
reply
Kind of makes me wonder how knowledge transfer is going to work in the future.

How many times have you found a random forum post solving your problem? How many countless people has that post likely helped?

Now every single person facing the same problem will regenerate from scratch the entire thought process and result. What a waste.

There needs to be some way to close the feedback loop from the work that LLMs do.

reply
FWIW, StackOverflow posts are licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA v4.0, same as Wikipedia.
reply
With or without training they would have gotten eaten.
reply
There is a difference between dying tomorrow and dying in 5 years.
reply
Why?
reply
The golden age of SO was when all the important questions that have accumulated over decades were getting asked and answered. SO stabilized once that backlog got finished, and then started dying once people moved to github issues for project-specific questions. Chatgpt just replaced the last remaining type of questions ("plz do my work for me"), which arguably shouldn't have been getting asked in the first place.
reply
The peak number of questions was in 2013, and they had roughly zero growth between 2013 & 2016. They were in decline long before LLMs were on the scene.
reply