Elon Musk, a tech tycoon and Tesla’s CEO, was astonished at the retaliation from Stack Overflow users against the company’s deal with OpenAI.

Wow, just wow

Today, DogeDesigner posted on the X platform, formerly Twitter, about the revolt of Stack Overflow users against its deal with ChatGPT parent OpenAI. The handle shared a Wired post about the users’ reaction and mentioned that Stack Overflow is banning the users who have tried to delete their posts on the site. In the post mentioned,

“Stack Overflow users are revolting against the deal with OpenAI, announcing they’d rather remove their posts than have their submissions used to train ChatGPT.”

Musk replied with a single word: Wow, but you know it’s from a billionaire, so… 

Source: X Platform.

Well, there is more to his pleasant surprise, as he had some sour dialogues with OpenAI recently.

According to the new API partnership, Stack Overflow’s content will be integrated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant. Users are not happy with the deal, and they are expressing their concerns and objecting to the alleged use of their content to train AI models of OpenAI, which is already under criticism for stealing copyrighted content.

Stack Overflow is a question-answer platform for developers that is used to ask technical questions and get help from other fellow users on coding and development. The site has a robust community of software developers who contribute their knowledge, and the site attracts developers across the globe who are looking for help. A user at Reddit replied in a comment to a post on the same subject, saying,

“ChatGPT has already scraped StackOverflow. It’s how v4 was so good at writing little scripts, etc. in the first place. I imagine the reason it suddenly got bad is because Stackoverflow complained or started legal stuff, so they re-trained without it, and now they’ve come to an “agreement” ($$$$$$) that suddenly it’s ok to use it again. So deleting or editing your questions won’t matter, as they’ll already have archives at this point.”

Source: Poddster.

Elon Musk and OpenAI

There is also a bit of history between OpenAI and Stack Overflow, as is the history between Elon Musk and OpenAI. 

Coming back to Elon Musk and ChatGPT, Mr. Musk sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman back in late February this year, accusing them of breaching the initial agreement that the company would not chase profits and keep things open source. 

It is also said that OpenAI was decided on and started after Musk and Altman, who were then managing a tech incubator, and some other people dined at the Rosewood Hotel in California. That is a preferred spot for making deals because of its close proximity to venture capital offices. It is believed that the dinner led to the creation of OpenAI in 2015, and Musk poured millions of dollars into the startup.

But later, Musk left OpenAI, and recently, after the lawsuit, OpenAI released emails between Altman, Musk, Brockman, and a few others that suggested that Musk was amenable to profit-making from OpenAI. 

Recently, OpenAI filed a copyright claim against SubReddit for using its logo, and Musk called OpenAI’s hypocrisy. Before that, OpenAI management said that Musk actually regrets his departure from the company that he co-founded and has grown to immense power and influence.