Last year, Stack Overflow became one of the first websites to announce it would charge AI giants for access to content used to train chatbots. His popular Q&A service for programmers has signed a deal with its first customer, Google, which CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says is the start of a “meaningful” new revenue stream.
The deal is important because it remains unclear how much Google and other AI developers will pay for content needed for AI projects. Millions of books and websites have promoted the development of AI systems, but most publishers have not been compensated and some have filed lawsuits alleging abuse. Many publishers, including Stack Overflow, appear to be threatened by his ChatGPT and other generative AI products, which can answer queries that would previously have been sent to programmers.
The deal will see Google’s cloud division leverage questions and answers from Stack Overflow about Google Cloud services and provide coding assistance and technical support through a version of Google’s Gemini chatbot. Google’s cloud computing customers can also ask questions through Google Cloud’s command-line interface. “Their AI may not have all the answers, so we have great capabilities to help complete that loop,” Chandrasekhar said. “We are the largest place where community knowledge is curated and validated.”
Gemini summarizes answers from Stack Overflow in its own words, including the company logo, a link to the original material, and the username of the site contributor who provided it. The companies plan to demonstrate the system at Google Cloud Next, the search company’s annual cloud conference, in April, and launch it shortly thereafter.
Chandrasekar said there are no major restrictions on how Google Cloud can use Stack Overflow data, and it can be used to train large-scale language models and other AI systems. “What we want to hold on to is trust, accuracy, quality, and attribution to the provenance of these AI outputs – those are non-negotiables for us,” he says.
He declined to say how much Google pays Stack Overflow for its data. “This will be a meaningful commercial proposition for us in the short, medium and long term,” Chandrasekhar said.
secret scraping
Google and other AI developers have previously collected data from Stack Overflow and other websites without much notice. As the demand for generative AI technologies soars and the valuations of the companies developing them soar, websites that provide basic text are beginning to claim what they consider their fair share. Fortunately for Stack Overflow, potential customers listened to the message, Chandrasekhar says. “We don’t have to chase people,” he says.
Stack Overflow data is especially useful for AI systems that generate computer code. It’s popular with software engineers and has proven to be a significant revenue source for Microsoft and OpenAI.
The new Stack Overflow deal comes just a week after Google reached a licensing agreement to collect data from discussion forum operator Reddit. That content helps the chatbot’s conversational abilities. Reddit announced plans to start charging for data access just before Stack Overflow launched last year.
