Last year Stack Overflow became one of the first websites to announce it would charge AI giants for access to content used to train chatbots. Now the popular Q&A service for coders has signed up its first customer—Google—in what CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar says is the start of a “meaningful” new stream of revenue. The deal is significant, because it remains unclear how broadly Google and other AI developers will pay for content needed for AI projects.
Covert Scraping Google and other AI developers have previously gathered data from Stack Overflow and other websites without much notice. As demand for generative AI technologies has surged—and the valuations of the companies developing them has rocketed—the websites supplying the foundational text have begun demanding what they view as their fair share. Fortunately for Stack Overflow, prospective customers have heeded the message, Chandrasekar says.