Stack Overflow and OpenAI announce partnership to enable ChatGPT to use knowledge from Stack Overflow answers

Stack Overflow and OpenAI are announcing a partnership that will bolster each of their respective offerings.

OpenAI will leverage Stack Overflow’s OverflowAPI to improve its models using content and feedback from Stack Overflow answers. According to the companies, it will only surface responses that have been vetted and deemed to be accurate. The goal is that this will provide developers access to “trusted, attributed, accurate, and highly technical knowledge and code backed by the millions of developers that have contributed to the Stack Overflow platform for 15 years,” the press release claims. 

When ChatGPT uses information from Stack Overflow, it will provide attribution back to the source. The companies believe this will help foster greater engagement with the Stack Overflow community.

“Learning from as many languages, cultures, subjects, and industries as possible ensures that our models can serve everyone,” said Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI. “The developer community is particularly important to both of us. Our deep partnership with Stack Overflow will help us enhance the user and developer experience on both our platforms.”

Stack Overflow will use OpenAI models to further develop OverflowAI, the company’s portfolio of generative AI capabilities that have been integrated across the website. The company will also work with OpenAI to get insights from internal testing that it can then use to optimize model performance. 

Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of Stack Overflow, added: “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.”

The first set of integrations between the two companies is expected to be available by the end of the first half of this year. They will then continue working together to add more features that will benefit customers of both companies.