Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

121–130 of 604 posts

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cursor ($9 bil) has a higher valuation than JetBrains ($7 bil). Think about that.

Tells me that the markets ability to sensibly valuate companies is pretty messed up.

or intellij is beyond its peak while cursor is just on the rise

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#122

Windsurf is terrible, I always use AI just in a normal website and I tried this product a few days ago and it asks me if it can run a command to make a file, which I find extremely strange, then it fails to write valid commands even to do mkdir.

It worked allright for me when I was using it, a month ago. I cancelled because they somhow lost my paid credits and refused to refund me. No matter how great an AI tool, if the company is mismanaging user payments or usage tracking, it is useless.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#123

I need someone to convince me this isn't one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition. If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion then what are they even doing? Windsurf can't have that high of a userbase that you feel the need to pay for it.

instinctively I agree but it's all about timing: if they try to build their own IDE and hired people it would probably still take a couple of years to get a decent product. I don't know about patents.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#124

It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.

Why didn't they just use ChatGPT to build it? Weird.

it would be only a few millions if they used cursor and Claude but their ego prevented it

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#126
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch. I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing? There are some extensions that work in this way and al…

It's better at coding, but they are essentially paying for users. I would also argue that the product could be built over two weekends with a small team. They offer some groundbreaking solutions, but since we know that they work and how, it's easy to replicate them. That also means they have significant talent there. Hence, they are also buying the employees. The code base itself is basically worth nothing, in my opi…

What groundbreaking solutions specifically?

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#127

It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.

They can, of course, but why would they waste time on it? They are buying a tool, talent, and a heap of paying enterprise customers. This is a steal.

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#128

It blows my mind OpenAI wouldn't be able to build a Windsurf alternative for orders of magnitude less than $3B.

Why didn't they just use ChatGPT to build it? Weird.

Sometimes it almost seems like the idea that LLMs are capable of instantly creating real, maintainable software is vastly overblown to inflate valuations...

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#129
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone that never used windsurf, what features does it have that GitHub copilot does not? Reading their webpages I didn't spot any "killer feature" that would convince me to switch. I always felt that cursor and windsurf should be just extension to vscode instead of a fork. Was there some missing functionality is vscode that was missing? Is it still missing? There are some extensions that work in this way and al…

It's better at coding, but they are essentially paying for users. I would also argue that the product could be built over two weekends with a small team. They offer some groundbreaking solutions, but since we know that they work and how, it's easy to replicate them. That also means they have significant talent there. Hence, they are also buying the employees. The code base itself is basically worth nothing, in my opi…

> They offer some groundbreaking solutions

What groundbreaking solutions does Windsurf offer?

Re: OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

#130

I need someone to convince me this isn't one of the biggest waste of money on an acquisition. If OpenAI can't build an official IDE for less than 3 Billion then what are they even doing? Windsurf can't have that high of a userbase that you feel the need to pay for it.

We don’t know how OpenAI is paying. A lot of comments seem to be assuming this is an all-cash deal. We have no evidence for that.
Post reply on HN