The reduction in the number of employees is directly related to the increasing popularity of generative AI assistants from companies such as Microsoft, AWS, Google, and IBM, as shown by a study conducted by Cornell University.
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Stack Overflow, a question and answer portal for developers, is laying off nearly one third of its employees. They will be replaced by programs based on generative artificial intelligence, such as Microsoft Copilot, Amazon CodeWhisperer, and Google Bard.
– This year we have taken many steps to spend less. Changes were made with the aim of minimizing the impact on the lives of our employees. Unfortunately, these changes were not enough and we made the extremely difficult decision to reduce employment in the company by about 28% – wrote in an official statement the CEO of the company Prashanth Chandrasekar.
The reductions, which affected the teams dealing with market entries and support, were the result of the company's strategy to focus on its products and strive for profitability, especially in times when macroeconomic conditions are uncertain, added Chandrasekar. Stack Overflow also restructured the remaining staff to enhance the offer of Overflow AI, which uses generative artificial intelligence to answer developers' questions.
While Chandrasekar blamed the layoffs on macroeconomic conditions, a study conducted by Cornell University showed that the reduction in employment may be directly related to the increasing popularity of generative artificial intelligence assistants.
“The results suggest that more and more users are adapting large language models to answer community questions and they are better substitutes for Stack Overflow for languages for which they have more training data,” the authors of the study wrote.
Although the authors noted the better performance of generative AI-based assistants, they also pointed out that the widespread adoption of such tools could lead to a departure from public information exchange on the network.
However, not only Stack Overflow is laying off. This year, other tech giants such as Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft also decided to take similar steps. According to data collected by Layoffs.fyi, an online platform tracking employment in the tech sector, over a thousand tech companies have laid off about over 243 thousand employees this year. Last year it was just over 164 thousand.
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