In March, over 1,000 developers and technologists responded to a survey conducted by Stack Overflow to discover developers' feelings about open-source AI. The results reveal a generational  divide.

The report on Stack Overflow Knows asks Are younger developers leading the way? and provides insights into their experience and attitudes regarding both open source and AI Assistants.

The survey found that most respondents (82%) have experience with open-source technology in general but among early-career devs, those with less than five years experience, 12% have no experience of open source and a slightly larger proportion are unsure about their use of open source.

It is the same group of respondents, those with up to 5 years of experience, that has the greatest overall level of trust in AI - but notice that trust in open source AI, the top set of charts, is trusted more than proprietary AI in the bottom set. 

Most users (66%) trust open-source AI for personal or school projects or for development work (61%), which is more than those (52% and 47% respectively) that trust proprietary AI for the same uses. Using proprietary AI for creative and strategic work had the lowest score for trust (43%).

The survey also asked about respondents about preference for and awareness of both proprietary and open source LLMs and ranked 17 models:

Open AI's proprietary GPT-4o came top both in terms of awareness (nearly 75%) and preference. The open source DeepSeek R1 came next by preference with around 55% awareness. Claude’s Sonnet model comes in third for preference even though only 5th in terms of awareness (around 30%),  

Of the top five models three are open-source Meta's Llama as well as two models for Deepseek and in the entire list open source models outnumber proprietary models, nine to eight.  

Developers with  less than 5 years of experience are most familiar with DeepSeek (open-source) and Google (proprietary) models. Those with 5-15 years of experience show higher familiarity with GPT-4o,  DeepSeek V3 and o1.

Commenting on the survey findings, Erin Yepis, Senior Analyst,

 "Open-source AI is rapidly becoming a cornerstone for developers, especially those early in their careers. The high trust in open-source models for personal and learning projects underscores the community's confidence in these tools. As the technology evolves, we expect its adoption to continue growing, driven by the next generation of developers.’’  

More Information

Survey Results on StackOverflow blog

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