Developer Q&A site Stack Overflow is today launching a new program that will give AI companies access to its knowledge base through a new API, aptly named OverflowAPI. The launch partner is Google, who uses Stack Overflow data to power Gemini for Google Cloud and provides his Stack Overflow answers validated in the Google Cloud console. Meanwhile, Stack Overflow plans to work with Google to bring more AI-powered features to its platform, a process it already started with the launch of OverflowAI last year.
Google and Stack Overflow will preview these integrations at Google's Cloud Next conference in April.
It's no secret that content-driven services like Stack Overflow (and Reddit, publishers, etc.) want to make sure they get paid when their large-scale language models ingest their data. Google and Stack Overflow haven't discussed financial terms of this partnership, but it's worth noting that this is not an exclusive partnership.
“Our thinking with Google is very specific to all the problems we want to solve for our users,” Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar told me. “It’s interesting the number of inbounds we receive from other companies – all kinds of companies experimenting with LLM training and AI products, cloud companies and non-cloud companies trying to become cloud companies. They're trying to leverage our data in a very powerful way. This program, this OverflowAPI program, is something that all of our partners can take advantage of in collaboration with us.”
However, a world where every developer could get answers from an AI chatbot would be a world where all developers go to the Stack Overflow website and ask questions and get answers (and then copy and paste them into their code). It is also a world where there will be far fewer. “We want to be wherever the developers are,” Chandrasekhar said when I asked about that. And while we acknowledge that we believe these AI tools will change developer workflows, we also believe in the need for a trusted knowledge base of verified answers. He says his ultimate vision is for “humans and AI to work together,” allowing developers to trust the answers from his AI tools. Because the answers from AI tools come from a knowledge base created by subject matter experts.
Also note that this is not just About AI. Google is also bringing his Stack Overflow directly to the Google Cloud console, allowing developers to see answers and ask questions directly from there.
“Imagine going to the Google Cloud console, entering a query, and seeing a Stack Overflow-specific response next to every Google-specific response,” said Google's VP of Developer Experience for Google Cloud. explained Gabe Monroy. . “These two will start to merge in terms of developer experience. This is very important because it means that developers will be able to have a smooth experience. Everything you want is in the same place, including Stack Overflow questions and answers, answers to Google Cloud-specific questions, and more.”
He also said that Gemini's answers include quotes so developers can check whether the results are correct.
On the Stack Overflow side, the idea is to use Gemini through Google's Vertex AI platform. The team is currently evaluating what that might look like, but you can imagine, for example, AI support in the questioning and moderation process, or an assistant answering questions on the site.
Stack Overflow derives its value from this vast user base of professional users and more than a decade of questions and answers on virtually every computer science problem (and Stack Overflow's research on similar sites on other topics). We also operate a network, but our current focus is on our flagship developer site). Chandrasekar said it is very important to keep this quality high and not diluted by poor AI-derived answers themselves. He is one of the reasons why Google is integrating the human element of his Stack Overflow platform.
“We want to keep the quality very high. It should be the best of the best in terms of quality and accuracy,” he said. He argued that for many developers, the threshold for asking questions will be much lower because they will be interacting with Gemini rather than a group of fellow programmers with their own opinions. “It’s great because it’s a little bit of the best of both worlds,” he said.
Google's Monroy similarly emphasized the importance of the human element in all of this. “As a stack team [Overflow] We plan to use Gemini to roll out new features that don't disrupt the beauty and purity of how Stack Overflow has served its developer community. […] It has been sacred for many years. ”
In the long term, Monroy said Google may also use the partnership to power its code completion model, currently called Codey.