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OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

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Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Cost to hire is now prohibitive. You're competing against companies like Meta paying tens of millions for top talent. 2. Cost to train is also prohibitive. Grok data centre has 200,000 H100 Graphics cards. Impossible for a startup to compete with this.

"Impossible for a startup to compete with this." its funny to me since xAI literally the "youngest" in this space and recently made an Grok4 that surpass all frontier model it literally not impossible

I mean, that's a startup backed by the richest man in the world who also was engaged with OpenAI in the beginning.

I assume startup here means the average one, that has a little bit less of funding and connections.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#412
post #56

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…

I think CC is just far more useful; I use it for literally everything and without MCP (except puppeteer sometimes) as it just writes python/bash scripts to do that far better than all those hacked together MCP garbage bins. It controls my computer & writes code. It made me better as well as now I actually write code, including GUI/web apps, that's are always fully scriptable. It helps me, but it definitely helps CC; it can just interrogate/test everything I make without puppeteer (or other web browser control, which is always brittle as hell).

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#413
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to see what you've built with all that extra productivity.

No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.

Not the OP but this is smth I've vibecoded using cursor: https://bestphoto.ai/ MRR ~$150. It basically started as a clone of my other site: https://aieasypic.com (MRR 2.5k, 5-8k/mo rev) since I was having trouble keeping code context in mind and claude was pretty bad at doing full features with the tech stack I used for that site(Django BE, NextJS FE) making adding new features a pain, so I completely switched to a stack that claude is very good at NextJS fullstack(trpc BE) and now it can basically one-shot a feature request.

Just putting this here because a lot of times AI coding seems to be dismissed as smth that can't do actual work ie generate revenue, while its more like making money as a solo dev is already pretty rare and if you're working in a corp. instead you're not going to just post your company name when asked for examples on what you're using AI for.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#414
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour using Opus on API credits. The model providers are heavily subsidized, the datacenters appear to be too. If you look at the Coreweave stuff and the private datacenters it starts looking like the telecom bubble. Even Meta is looking to finance datacenter expansion - https://www.reuters.com/business/meta-seeks-29-billion-priva... The reason they are talking about building new nuclear pow…

> Pretty easy to hit $100 an hour I don’t see how that can be true, but if it is… Either you, or I are definitely use Claude Code incorrectly.

It’s definitely easy with an API key I hit 200$ in an evening. I didn’t think that could be possible. Horrifying

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Cost to hire is now prohibitive. You're competing against companies like Meta paying tens of millions for top talent. 2. Cost to train is also prohibitive. Grok data centre has 200,000 H100 Graphics cards. Impossible for a startup to compete with this.

"Impossible for a startup to compete with this." its funny to me since xAI literally the "youngest" in this space and recently made an Grok4 that surpass all frontier model it literally not impossible

Most startups don't have Elon Musk's money.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#416
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious to see what you've built with all that extra productivity.

No one ever shares their great and shipped products. AI built slop is for generating hype not revenue or users.

The other day someone was gloating they'd created a 30k LoC code base in a few weeks with a similar setup.

I'd consider that a liability, not an asset, but they were pretty happy with it.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#417
post #56

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…

>> Claude Code has absolutely exploded Does anyone have a comparison between this and OpenAI Codex? I find OpenAI's thing really good actually (vastly better workflow that Windsurf). Maybe I am missing out however.

never met anyone who used codex lol

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#418
post #56

IMO other than the Microsoft IP issue, I think the biggest thing that has shifted since this acquisition was first in the works is Claude Code has absolutely exploded. Forking an IDE and all the expense that comes with that feels like a waste of effort, considering the number of free/open source CLI agentic tools that are out there. Let's review the current state of things: - Terminal CLI agents are several orders of…

And open source tools like aider are, of course, even more validated and get more eyes.

Plus recently launched OpenCode, open source CC is gaining traction fast.

There was always very little moat in the model wrapper.

The main value of CC is the free tool built by people who understand all the internals of their own models.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#419
post #21

It's another Character.ai situation [0]. Unfortunate for any employees who aren't founders or researchers, as they don't get any payout or a nice new job from this exit structure. In fact they lose their whole time invested at the company. What a harsh time to work for an AI startup as a rank and file employee! I wonder how the founders justify going along with it inside their mind. [0] Character.ai CEO Noam Shazeer…

Just like with Character I'm assuming the employees get something. Whatever nonsense "licensing" fee Google is paying to not cause an antitrust investigation should be paid out straight to employees

The general character of capital markets is to pay as little as possible. Otherwise you lose out to those who are more ruthless. It is plausible that Windsurf employees really are getting very little value for their work. We need to see details of the deal.

Re: OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off, and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed on everything. Just to add, not only anthropic is offering CC at like a 500% loss, they restricted sonnet/opus 4 access to windsurf, and jacked up their enterprise deal to Cursor. The increase in price was so big that it forced cursor to make that disastrous downgrade to their plans. I think only way Cursor and other UX wrappers still win is if on device models or at least open source models catch up in the ne…

Seems like the survival strategy for cursor would be to develop their own frontier coding model. Maybe they can leverage the data from their still somewhat significant lead in the space to make a solid effort.

interestingly windsurf have done this (I'm not sure how frontier this model is...but it's their own model) https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-wave-9-swe-1 but AFAIK cursor have not.
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