Knowledge-as-a-Service or KaaS is a new abbreviation Prashanth Chandrasekar, CEO of StackOverflow, wants you to know. He presented KaaS, StackOverflow’s latest attempt to find a solution to its growing AI problems, at the WeAreDevelopers World Congress in Berlin.

Their original AI problem was that developers were turning less to Stack Overflow and more to AI tools with their coding questions.

They tried to solve it by launching OverflowAI, a set of AI-powered products that were supposed to combine AI’s summarization, aggregation, and conversational capabilities with the immense knowledge base of the StackOverflow community. They also emphasized that those who provided knowledge are credited and cited as the main differentiators from AI coding assistants.

It obviously didn’t resonate with developers well enough, as StackOverflow announced in May this year that it would be partnering with OpenAI. The partnership will allow OpenAI to access years of StackOverflow’s community contributions to train its AI model.

Community-driven knowledge + AI

The result of that is Stack Overflow’s concept of combining community-driven Knowledge as a Service(KaaS) with AI while preserving the vital role of human contributors.

Chandrasekar opened his presentation with a critical point: data quality matters immensely in the AI race. Stack Overflow’s curated Q&A database, meticulously built over 16 years, is a goldmine for training AI models. The database is based on 60 million questions and answers, all curated by a knowledgeable and engaged community of developers and technologists.

He did not address the fact that these developers and technologists are becoming less enthusiastic about contributing to a knowledge base that uses their contributions to train AI models.

Stack Overflow in your IDE

One of KaaS’s key points is its design. It can be integrated with widely used development environments and tools like Microsoft Visual Studio Code, GitHub, Slack, Confluence, and Jira. This integration ensures developers can access and contribute to the knowledge base without disrupting their workflow, Chandrasekar says:

Tomorrow, if you’re going to be spending a lot more time in your IDE, we want to enable these trusted and attributed answers to show up there.

We want you to be able to post questions straight from your IDE into Stack Overflow and get answers straight in your IDE.

Photo: Marin Pavelić

Quo Vadis, Stack Overflow?

Chandrasekar said that with community-driven Knowledge-as-a-service, Stack Overflow will redefine how knowledge is shared and utilized in the tech industry, reinforcing its role as a cornerstone of the developer community.

His vision for Stack Overflow is this:

• Keep developers in their flow
• Provide them with trusted knowledge
• Support the continuous evolution of AI through community-driven insights