Stack Overflow and OpenAI today announced a partnership aimed at combining the strengths of Stack Overflow’s knowledge platform for technical content with OpenAI’s models, such as GPT-4. This development follows Stack Overflow’s decision in 2022 to ban all answers generated by ChatGPT, citing a high degree of inaccuracy in the bot’s responses.

Through the OverflowAPI access, OpenAI and Stack Overflow aim to provide developers with reliable and validated data, empowering them to find quick solutions to complex problems. This collaboration will also integrate verified technical knowledge from Stack Overflow directly into ChatGPT, enhancing users’ access to accurate information.

As part of this partnership, OpenAI will leverage Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI product to enhance model performance and gather feedback from the developer community, ensuring continuous improvement in AI development tools. This collaboration will not only benefit OpenAI but also contribute to Stack Overflow’s efforts in building better products that benefit their user community.

According to Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI, the partnership is crucial in ensuring that models can serve a broad audience by learning from diverse sources. “Learning from as many languages, cultures, subjects, and industries as possible ensures that our models can serve everyone,” he said.

Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, highlighted the significance of the partnership in redefining the developer experience. “Stack Overflow is the world’s largest developer community, with more than 59 million questions and answers. Through this industry-leading partnership with OpenAI, we strive to redefine the developer experience, fostering efficiency and collaboration through the power of community, best-in-class data, and AI experiences,” he said.

The first set of integrations and capabilities resulting from this partnership is expected to be available in the first half of 2024.

In a survey conducted by Stack Overflow in June 2023, it was found that 44% of developers currently integrate AI tools into their development workflow, while 26% have plans to do so in the near future.

This situation has prompted a significant challenge for Stack Overflow. There has been a notable decline in platform traffic following the introduction of advanced generative AI models last year. These models, which often used data sourced from Stack Overflow, have contributed to this decline.

As a response to this trend and to manage costs effectively, Stack Overflow is now exploring licensing agreements with AI providers.