What ChatGPT’s corporate victims have in common

livemint.com:

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. In less than four years the share price of Chegg, an online education service, has dropped by 99%. A post-pandemic slump in digital learning is partly to blame for its tumble.

A bigger problem for the company, though, is artificial intelligence (AI). Its customers are mostly students who want help answering their homework assignments, which often involves the virtual support of a human tutor. The rise of ChatGPT and its kind have created a free substitute for that service.

On an earnings call on November 12th Nathan Schultz, Chegg’s boss, admitted that “technology shifts have created headwinds". The same day the firm said that it would fire a fifth of its workforce. Chegg is one of an emerging group of firms that have already been pummelled by ChatGPT-like generative AI.

Two others stand out: Stack Exchange, which runs Stack Overflow, an online forum for software developers, and RWS, a translation service. These emerging AI victims offer clues as to when a business may be strengthened by the technology and when it will be upended. For years Stack Overflow was the go-to place for developers to get help with tricky coding problems.

Many are now turning to code-writing AI assistants instead, such as Microsoft’s Github Copilot. Two-fifths of coders say they use such tools. According to Similarweb, a data provider, Stack Overflow’s monthly internet traffic has fallen by half over the past two years.

Last year the company went through two rounds of layoffs, firing about a third of its workforce in total. “Death by LLM," is how Elon Musk described the company’s fate on X, the social media-site he owns, referring to the large language models that underpin generative AI. Translation services