And famously obnoxious about rejecting questions that are properly asked, properly categorized, and not actually duplicated.

SO is not obnoxious because the users are wrong!

The company tried this. It fell through immediately. So they went away, and came back with a much improved version. It also fell through immediately. Turns out, this idea is just bad: LLMs can't rephrase questions accurately, when those questions are novel, which is precisely the case that Stack Overflow needs.

For the pedantic: there were actually three attempts, all of which failed. The question title generator was positively received (https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/388492/308065), but ultimately removed (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/q/424638/5223757) because it didn't work properly, and interfered with curation. The question formatting assistant failed obviously and catastrophically (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/425167/5223757). The new question assistant failed in much the same ways (https://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/432638/5223757), despite over a year of improvements, but was pushed through anyway.

This is an excellent piece of information that I didn’t have. If the company with most data can’t succeed, then it seems like a really hard problem. On the side, they can understand why humans couldn’t do it either.