Under the influence of ChatGPT, the famous developer Q&A community Stack Overflow can't hold out to lay off its staff!
With the massive shift of users to ChatGPT, the number of visits to Stack Overflow has plummeted, and the profitability situation is not optimistic.
CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar confessed in an open letter that Stack Overflow is in a difficult period. Specifically, this wave of Stack Overflow will lay off 10% of its staff at a time, which means that all 58 employees of the company will pack up and leave.
Once the news came out, netizens already sat down. Some netizens flirted with the letter using AI as one of the reasons for the layoffs, "AI is a new and novel field, so it's obviously more suitable for young employees to survive."
Others are even more present about the current situation Stack Overflow finds itself in: The number of times I visit Stack Overflow now is probably only 10% of ChatGPT, right?
So, what's the deal with this wave of layoffs? Why is Stack Overflow laying off employees? In an open letter, Stack Overflow's CEO explained two reasons for the decision:
Out of consideration of the company's profitability focus and macroeconomic pressures for the current fiscal year. It was also the result of a deeper review of the company's strategic priorities and organizational structure for the current fiscal year.
Specifically, Stack Overflow has been increasing its investment in Stack Overflow for Teams over the past several years. And Stack Overflow for Teams is actually the enterprise version of Stack Overflow, a service that companies can purchase to share knowledge and collaborate internally.
The letter mentions that Stack Overflow is "looking for a flexible strategy" to continue to develop Stack Overflow for Teams, and also plans to launch new products focused on artificial intelligence/machine learning in the next few months, which is one of the reasons for restructuring the organization.
It seems to be really thinking about how to get money to live.
CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar said that the company will support the employment transition of these laid-off employees by providing compensation, extending health insurance benefits and offering re-employment services.
And concluded the open letter by writing: Another post will be shared on the blog next week with a review of the fourth fiscal quarter and a look at future plans.
So what exactly is causing Stack Overflow's financial stress?
Previously, a user gave a set of data, since the launch of ChatGPT, Stack Overflow visits have dropped significantly:
It was also stated that GPT poses a threat to Stack Overflow's dominant position::
The butterfly effect caused by ChatGPT has become more and more obvious. The butterfly effect caused by ChatGPT has become more and more obvious. A large number of users have switched to ChatGPT because of the satisfactory results.
To add insult to injury, Stack Overflow itself is a free public community platform, and the company relies heavily on Stack Overflow for Teams for profit.
With a sharp decline in traffic, fewer users, and its own difficulties in making a profit, Stack Overflow had to shift its strategy and make a move to lay off employees.
ChatGPT's Industry "Shuffle" Continues
In fact, it's not just Stack Overflow that's had a rough start to 2023 in the tech world.
Companies including GitHub and GitLab, and the U.S. version of the headline BuzzFeed, have also been affected by ChatGPT's layoffs.
On February 9, GitHub and GitLab announced 10% and 7% layoffs respectively, and BuzzFeed also announced 12% layoffs previously. The reasons for layoffs are also quite similar: unfavorable revenue, adjusting company income and expenses ......
The reason behind the layoffs is the fierce competitive relationship. We all know that training big models requires massive amounts of data. This is true whether it is OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta or other companies.
But the way these tech giants generally get this data is by grabbing it from the internet, so they don't shell out money to the companies behind the corresponding data. The data they obtain from thousands of online "sources" including Stack Overflow and Reddit.
The tech giants then "feed" the data to big models to make conversational AI smarter and more intelligent. After the products are mature enough to be "onboarded," the tech giants will open up a paid model, such as the familiar ChatGPT Plus, GitHub Copilot, and so on. But in this process, sites like Stack Overflow and Reddit are a little worse for wear.
Some time ago, Reddit and Stack Overflow also made a revolt: want to white whoring, no way! The AI used their family's data to do training and become stronger and better. And it seems that the birth of these AI is not much benefit for them, but may turn out to be very competitive rivals.
Back in March, Open AI conducted a study on the potential impact of Large Language Models (LLM) on the U.S. labor market.
The results of the study showed that the introduction of the Big Language Model would affect 10 percent of work tasks for about 80 percent of the U.S. workforce; for about 19 percent of workers, half of all work tasks would be affected.
On top of that, ChatGPT will directly result in 26% of European software and technology companies planning to lay off workers, according to a recent survey by data research firm SortlistData Hubde in February of this year.
Taking these circumstances into account, it seems that the crisis of Stack Overflow is not a surprise.
Faced with such fierce competition, how do you think a company like Stack Overflow should respond?
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