As much as 40% of Stack Overflow's 30 million Indian users have less than five years of technology experience and are keen to learn artificial intelligence, said Prashanth Chandrasekar, chief executive of the world’s largest community platform for software developers.
Chandrasekar’s comment indicates the interest in India to learn AI at a time when lower-level business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs are facing massive displacement due to the adoption of the technology.
He cautioned that Indians would be checkmated by AI if they don't learn software programming and only rely on AI tools. "If youth don't learn properly how to do software programming, just use AI tools blindly, they're not going to learn anything. At some point, AI itself is going to catch up with them," he told ET during an interaction.
The company has made its programming-focused question-and-answer platform, Stack Overflow.AI, free for Indian users. The AI assist feature allows users to ask technical questions through a Gen-AI format. The resultant ChatGPT-style response draws from the content of the website accumulated since 2008, alongside supporting attribution and links.
He said human developers aren't expected to be replaced by AI agents anytime soon. Despite fears of the developer count dwindling in the US throughout the BPO sector and jobs being automated and shipped out, the number of US-based developers has increased dramatically, he said.
With over 100 million monthly active users globally, Stack Overflow has been the largest software developer community globally, but is now pivoting towards AI by licensing its data to AI companies, Chandrasekar said. "Our data is now being used to pre-train large language models (LLMs) by major AI labs. It's part of our 'knowledge as a service' strategy. We've got relationships with Open AI, Google, cloud providers, and big AI labs," he said. Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbots are being trained on Stack Overflow data, he said.
Enterprise products, including data licensing or 'knowledge as a service' now account for 75% of the company's revenue, overtaking traditional advertising, Chandrasekhar said. The website's repository of content, measured at 60 billion tokens, is now also being surfaced on AI tools such as ChatGPT.
Chandrasekar said Stack Overflow internal, the private version of Stack Overflow sold to banks, healthcare, and tech companies, counts Lloyds Bank, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce as customers.
All the data, including technical questions and answers specific to the company’s operations, reside within the company's internal bubble, allowing them to establish a proprietary knowledge base, he said.
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Chandrasekar’s comment indicates the interest in India to learn AI at a time when lower-level business process outsourcing (BPO) jobs are facing massive displacement due to the adoption of the technology.
He cautioned that Indians would be checkmated by AI if they don't learn software programming and only rely on AI tools. "If youth don't learn properly how to do software programming, just use AI tools blindly, they're not going to learn anything. At some point, AI itself is going to catch up with them," he told ET during an interaction.
The company has made its programming-focused question-and-answer platform, Stack Overflow.AI, free for Indian users. The AI assist feature allows users to ask technical questions through a Gen-AI format. The resultant ChatGPT-style response draws from the content of the website accumulated since 2008, alongside supporting attribution and links.
He said human developers aren't expected to be replaced by AI agents anytime soon. Despite fears of the developer count dwindling in the US throughout the BPO sector and jobs being automated and shipped out, the number of US-based developers has increased dramatically, he said.
With over 100 million monthly active users globally, Stack Overflow has been the largest software developer community globally, but is now pivoting towards AI by licensing its data to AI companies, Chandrasekar said. "Our data is now being used to pre-train large language models (LLMs) by major AI labs. It's part of our 'knowledge as a service' strategy. We've got relationships with Open AI, Google, cloud providers, and big AI labs," he said. Google's Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbots are being trained on Stack Overflow data, he said.
Enterprise products, including data licensing or 'knowledge as a service' now account for 75% of the company's revenue, overtaking traditional advertising, Chandrasekhar said. The website's repository of content, measured at 60 billion tokens, is now also being surfaced on AI tools such as ChatGPT.
Chandrasekar said Stack Overflow internal, the private version of Stack Overflow sold to banks, healthcare, and tech companies, counts Lloyds Bank, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce as customers.
All the data, including technical questions and answers specific to the company’s operations, reside within the company's internal bubble, allowing them to establish a proprietary knowledge base, he said.
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