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    Although I agree, the CEO perspective on this is that StackOverflow has to be building something new oriented toward growing revenue. We, the users of SO, recognize that GenAI is a bad idea for SO. But the sales team needs buzzwords to market the Teams product. Sadly, we can't just say "kill GenAI"--we have to offer a more compelling alternative way for SO to drive revenue. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 18:37
  • 3
    Yes and I didn't request to completely "kill GenAI" (just to put less resources/effort into it and focus on what's important). However, I don't think it would work out if they kept the same focus on it. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 18:44
  • And it would be a relief (and I think a lot of people here would agree on that) to hear that no big GenAI initiatives were planned - but that might just be wishful thinking. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 18:57
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    Honestly, if Stack Overflow wanted to make a competitive GenAI product, they'd need to increase spending on it, massively. There's no use in having a worse conversational AI than Copilot/ChatGPT/CodeWhisperer/Replit etc. Microsoft has recently realized how enormously tricky integrating hallucinating GenAI in a business product is, so I don't see it being sensible for Teams either. Just investing a bit serves no other purpose than having something to talk about to investors. And given that GenAI has been a huge money burning machine for nearly all companies, that's not that useful either. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 19:31
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    Well, I don't think they can afford doing that. Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 19:33
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    Indeed, so they should scrap it fully. There's no in-between with AI Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 8:05
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    Not sure how realistic that is but I don't feel I am in the position to request that. Commented Oct 17, 2023 at 10:13
  • 12
    @ErikA There's no in-between with AI systems intended to be generalist – a big part of OpenAI's brand is producing “AGI” (which is awful at most stuff, but it attempts most stuff! Wow!). Special-purpose AI, like auto-summarisation tools for specific fields, can require vastly fewer resources while producing better outcomes: we had decent auto-summarisation tools before “LLM” was coined, we had decent OCR and image recognition of pastries before massive neural networks became a thing, etc.. Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 20:47
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    Also if one uses an LLM for tasks special-purpose AI systems could be good for, they shouldn't expect too much of it. Commented Oct 18, 2023 at 21:17
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    Since AFAIK there's not been a single company so far that's made a profit from genAI, I'd say it's insane that they don't just cut that tumor off from the company, instead of firing quite literally essential and priceless employees like V2Blast. Commented Oct 23, 2023 at 12:31
  • Glad someone brought up this elephant. The whole point of the SE network (all sites) has been the human interaction and knowledge. Replacing people with computers that "think" can only go poorly. Whether here or at any company/site. Commented Oct 23, 2023 at 12:56