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Death by LLM: Stack Overflow's decline, and its plan to survive, shows the future of free online data in an AI world
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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I like the experience using Copilot and GPT much better than browsing SO, but this is what worries me in the long-term though:
Without this incredible knowledge sharing and curated feedback, in an environment that constantly changes with new libraries, languages, and best practices, these LLMs are doomed. I think solving this might be Stack Overflow's way out.
if we use embedding and the language documentation, I wonder how much it can work out going forward?
Nothing because language models don't understand the text they read.
From what we see today based on these LLMs that are given a larger context (e.g. internal documentation or knowledge bases), we can say that it'd be as good as a decent developer that reads said documentation and it's able to apply that knowledge to a specific use case.
But Stack Overflow answers often target things that don't come up in the docs, that are outdated, or somewhat case-dependent and/or opinionated. Answers that might even lead to changes in documentation. This kind of insight will be hampered over time without a way of continuously sharing such knowledge.