Google’s Deal With StackOverflow Is the Latest Proof That AI Giants Will Pay for Data
Last 12 months Stack Overflow turned one of many first web sites to announce it might cost AI giants for entry to content material used to coach chatbots. Now the fashionable Q&A service for coders has signed up its first buyer—Google—in what CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says is the beginning of a “meaningful” new stream of income.
The deal is important, as a result of it stays unclear how broadly Google and different AI builders can pay for content material wanted for AI tasks. Millions of books and web sites have fueled the event of AI programs, however most publishers haven’t been compensated, and a few are suing over what they allege is misuse. Many publishers, together with Stack Overflow, seem threatened by ChatGPT and different generative AI merchandise, which might reply queries that may have beforehand despatched coders their approach.
The deal will see Google’s cloud division use questions and solutions from Stack Overflow about Google Cloud companies to supply coding help and technical help by way of a model of Google’s Gemini chatbot. Google’s cloud computing prospects can even be capable to ask questions by way of Google Cloud’s command-line interface. “Their AI may not have all the answers, and so we have a huge ability to help complete that loop,” Chandrasekar says. “We are the biggest place where community knowledge is curated and validated.”
Gemini will summarize solutions drawn from Stack Overflow in its personal phrases however embrace the corporate’s emblem, a hyperlink again to the unique materials, and the username of the positioning contributor who equipped it. The corporations plan to display the system at Google Cloud Next, the search firm’s annual cloud convention in April, and launch it quickly after.
Chandrasekar says there are not any vital restrictions on how Google Cloud can use Stack Overflow knowledge, that means it may be used to coach massive language fashions and different AI programs. “Where we want to stand firm on is—nonnegotiable things for us— trust, accuracy, quality, and attribution back to the sources of these AI outputs,” he says.
He declined to say how a lot Stack Overflow is being paid by Google for the info. “This will be a meaningful commercial offering for us in the near term, medium term, and long term,” Chandrasekar says.
Covert Scraping
Google and different AI builders have beforehand gathered knowledge from Stack Overflow and different web sites with out a lot discover. As demand for generative AI applied sciences has surged—and the valuations of the businesses creating them has rocketed—the web sites supplying the foundational textual content have begun demanding what they view as their fair proportion. Fortunately for Stack Overflow, potential prospects have heeded the message, Chandrasekar says. “We’re not having to chase people,” he says.
Stack Overflow knowledge is especially helpful to AI programs that generate laptop code, which have confirmed to be fashionable with software program engineers and a big income for Microsoft and OpenAI.
The new Stack Overflow deal comes only a week after Google reached a licensing settlement to vacuum up knowledge from Reddit, the dialogue boards operator, whose content material has helped chatbots’ means to converse. Reddit had unveiled plans to begin charging for knowledge entry simply earlier than Stack Overflow had final 12 months.
