Just Now Possible

Just Now Possible

By Teresa TorresBusinessEntrepreneurshipTechnology
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Just Now Possible episodes

  • Turning Disruption into Opportunity: The Stack Overflow AI Story with Ellen Brandenberger
    Guest:

    Ellen Brandenburger – Product leader and coach; former head of product at Chegg Skills and Stack Overflow’s data licensing team.

    What we cover in this episode:
    • How Ellen joined Stack Overflow just two weeks before ChatGPT launched, reshaping the company’s future overnight
    • The creation of Overflow AI: a team tasked with exploring “what’s just now possible” for developers
    • Four iterations of conversational search:
    • V1: a chat UI on top of keyword search
    • V2: semantic search to handle natural questions
    • V3: fallback to GPT-4 for gaps in Stack Overflow’s corpus
    • V4: adding RAG for attribution and transparency
    • Why attribution and transparency were critical for developer trust
    • How the team used simple spreadsheets and subject-matter experts to evaluate answer accuracy, relevance, and completeness
    • Why Stack decided to sunset conversational search despite heavy investment—what they learned and why it wasn’t wasted
    • The pivot to data licensing: how Stack Overflow leveraged its 14M+ Q&A corpus to power LLM training and benchmarks
    • Building industry benchmarks with subject-matter experts to prove Stack data improved LLM accuracy and relevance
      • Key lessons:
      • Take one bite of the apple at a time—prototype, learn, iterate
      • Product in the AI era means managing probabilities, not certainties
        • Links & References:
        • Ellen Brandenburger on LinkedIn
        • The Changing State of the Internet and Related Business Models
        • ProLLM: LLM benchmarks for real-world use-cases
          • 1 hr 8 min
        • Podcast Preview
          How AI products come to life—straight from the builders themselves. In each episode, we dive deep into how teams spotted a customer problem, experimented with AI, prototyped solutions, and shipped real features. We dig into everything from workflows and agents to RAG and evaluation strategies, and explore how their products keep evolving. If you’re building with AI, these are the stories for you.
          The first full episode drops on Thursday, September 18th. Don't miss it!
          2 min

        About Just Now Possible

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        How AI products come to life—straight from the builders themselves. In each episode, we dive deep into how teams spotted a customer problem, experimented with AI, prototyped solutions, and shipped…