The Stack Overflow Podcast

Even GenAI uses Wikipedia as a source

Ryan is joined by Philippe Saade, the AI project lead at Wikimedia Deutschland, to dive into the Wikidata Embedding Project and how their team vectorized 30 million of Wikidata’s 119 million entries for semantic search. They discuss how this project helped offload the burden that scraping was creating for their sites, what Wikimedia.DE is doing to maintain data integrity for their entries, and the importance of user feedback even as they work to bring Wikipedia’s vast knowledge to people building open-source AI projects.  Episode notes:  Wikimedia.DE [http://wikimedia.de] announced the Wikidata Embedding Project [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Embedding_Project] with MCP support in October of last year. Check out their vector database [https://wd-vectordb.wmcloud.org/] and codebase [https://github.com/philippesaade-wmde/WikidataTextEmbedding] for the project.  Connect with Philippe on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippesaade1998/] and his Wiki page [https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Philippe_Saade_(WMDE)].  Today’s shoutout goes to an Unsung Hero [https://stackoverflow.com/help/badges/226/unsung-hero] on Stack Overflow—someone who has more than 10 accepted answers with a zero score, making up 25% of their total. Thank you to user MWB [https://stackoverflow.com/users/4331279/mwb] for bringing your knowledge to the community! TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/02/20/even-genai-uses-wikipedia-as-a-source/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Why Stack Overflow and Cloudflare launched a pay-per-crawl model

In this episode of Leaders of Code, Stack Overflow’s Janice Manningham and Josh Zhang sit down with Cloudflare VP Will Allen to discuss the innovative pay-per-crawl model co-launched by their organizations. They explore how the rise of AI has disrupted the traditional “open versus block” internet model, creating a need for platforms to protect their content and data from commercial exploitation while maintaining community access. The discussion also: * Explores the future of the bot ecosystem, emphasizing the importance of putting publishers back in the driver’s seat to decide how their content is accessed and monetized. * Explains the technical implementation of the pay-per-crawl system, which uses Cloudflare’s bot categorization and WAF rules to serve a 402 “Payment Required” message to specific crawlers. * Highlights the strategic value of data licensing, comparing comprehensive enterprise contracts with the more flexible, programmatic pay-per-use access enabled by the new model. Notes * Connect with Will Allen [https://www.linkedin.com/in/williamallen2050/], Janice Manningham [https://www.linkedin.com/in/janicemanningham/] and Josh Zhang [https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-zhang-sre/] on LinkedIn. * Learn more about Stack Overflow Data Licensing here [https://stackoverflow.co/data-licensing/?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=blog&utm_campaign=leaders-of-code&utm_content=pay-per-crawl-episode]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Data is the new oil, and your database is the only way to extract it

Ryan sits down with Shireesh Thota, CVP of Azure Databases at Microsoft, to discuss the evolution of databases at Microsoft; Azure’s comprehensive portfolio that includes SQL Server, CosmosDB, and Postgres; and the challenges that come with database architecture, from the importance of cost governance and multi-cloud strategies to the future of databases when it comes to AI. Episode notes:  You can read all about the latest Azure database announcements from Microsoft Ignite—including updates for SQL Server, Postgres, DocumentDB, and Fabric—on their Azure blog [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-at-microsoft-ignite-2025-all-the-intelligent-cloud-news-explained/].  Connect with Shireesh on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/shireeshthota/]. Today’s shoutout goes to user Guffa [https://stackoverflow.com/users/69083/guffa] for winning a Populist badge on their answer to Virtual method tables [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2413483/virtual-method-tables].  TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/02/17/data-is-the-new-oil/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

Even your voice is a data problem

Recorded last December at AWS re:Invent, Ryan welcomes CEO and co-founder of Deepgram, Scott Stephenson, for a conversation on advancing voice AI technology. They cover how Deepgram is improving speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities using deep learning to take on challenges posed by dialects and noisy environments and the moral and ethical considerations voice AI companies have to make when it comes to voice cloning and synthetic data training.  Episode notes:  Deepgram [https://deepgram.com/] builds accurate, scalable, and affordable large scale voice AI for speech recognition, generation, and AI Agents. Connect with Scott on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-stephenson-/], Twitter [https://x.com/deepgramscott], or email him at Scott@Deepgram.com TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/02/13/even-your-voice-is-a-data-problem/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].

The logos, ethos, and pathos of your LLMs

Ryan is joined by Professor Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton University’s AI Lab, to dive into findings from his new book The Laws of Thought, which explores the history of the philosophy, mathematics, and logic that underlie artificial intelligence, and scientists' efforts to describe our minds using mathematics. They discuss the challenges of understanding human cognition, the implications of probabilistic AI “thinking,” and where Aristotle fits into the philosophical discussions we’re having on consciousness and sentience in AI.  Episode notes:  The Laws of Thought [https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250358363/thelawsofthought/] details our quest to use mathematics to describe the ways we think, from its origins three hundred years ago to the ideas behind modern AI systems and how our human minds differ from the neural networks of AI.  Connect with Tom on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-griffiths-7b31a0364/] and find more of his work at the Princeton website [https://cocosci.princeton.edu/tom/tom.php].  Congrats to user Andreas Rayo Kniep [https://stackoverflow.com/users/2813227/andreas-rayo-kniep] for winning a Populist badge for their answer to Is there a difference between the UTC and Etc/UTC time zones? [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14128574/is-there-a-difference-between-the-utc-and-etc-utc-time-zones]. We want to know what you're using to upskill and learn in the age of AI. Take this five minute survey [https://stackoverflow.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_beHfwZ2k1tEx0PA?utm_medium=podcast&utm_source=house-ads&utm_campaign=pulse-survey-learning&utm_content=take-survey] on learning and AI to have your voice heard in our next Stack Overflow Knows Pulse Survey.  TRANSCRIPT [https://stackoverflow.blog/2026/02/10/the-logos-ethos-and-pathos-of-your-llms/] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy [https://art19.com/privacy] and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info [https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info].