Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models • Hacker News Board

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#21

Post by NitpickLawyer » Fri, May 16, 2025, 9:51 AM UTC

anshumankmr wrote: post #17

rfoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mid/post training does not cost that much, except maybe large scale RL, but even this is more of an infra problem. If anything, the cost is mostly in running various experiments (i.e. the process of doing research). It is very puzzling why "wrapper" companies don't (and religiously say they won't ever) do something on this front. The only barrier is talents.

You might be underestimating the barrier to hiring the really smart people. Open AI/Google etc would be hiring and poaching people like crazy, offering cushy bonuses and TCs that would make blow your mind.(Like say Noam Brown at Open AI) And some of the more ambitious ones would start their own ventures (like say Ilya etc.). That being said I am sure a lot of the so called wrapper companies are paying insanely well t…

FAANGMULA ... Microsoft, Uber?, L??, Anthropic? Who's the L?

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#22

Post by bluelightning2k » Fri, May 16, 2025, 9:54 AM UTC

antirez wrote: post #15

So because they need to have a better business model, they will try to move users to weaker models compared to the best available? This "AI inside the editor" thing makes every day less sense in many dimensions: it makes you not really capable of escaping the accept, accept, accept trap. It makes the design interaction with the LLM too much about code and too little about the design itself. And you can't do what many…

I don't like or agree with this take. You're basically saying - "something good exists, so why try to improve upon it".

Their stated goal is to improve on the frontier models. It's ambitious, but on the other hand they were a model company before they were an IDE company (IIRC) and they have a lot of data, and the scope is to make a model which is specialized for their specific case.

At the very least I would expect they would succeed in specializing a fronteir model for their use-case by feeding their pipeline of data (whether they should have that data to begin with is another question).

The blog post doesn't say much about the model itself, but there's a few candidates to fine tune from.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#23

Post by bluelightning2k » Fri, May 16, 2025, 9:58 AM UTC

Two takes here. Cynical and optimistic.

Cynical take: describing yourself as a full stack AI IDE company sounds very invest-able in a "what if they're right" kind of way. They could plausibly ask for higher valuations, etc.

Optimistic take: fine tuning a model for their use-case (incomplete code snippets with a very specific data model of context) should work. Or even has from their claims. It certainly sounds plausible that fine-tuning a frontier model would make it better for their needs. Whether it's reasonable to go beyond fine-tuning and consider pre-training etc. I don't know. If I remember correctly they were a model company before Windsurf, so they have the skillset.

Bonus take: doesn't this mean they're basically training on large-scale gathered user data?

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#24

Post by conartist6 » Fri, May 16, 2025, 10:04 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #16

antirez wrote: post #15

So because they need to have a better business model, they will try to move users to weaker models compared to the best available? This "AI inside the editor" thing makes every day less sense in many dimensions: it makes you not really capable of escaping the accept, accept, accept trap. It makes the design interaction with the LLM too much about code and too little about the design itself. And you can't do what many…

> it makes you not really capable of escaping the accept, accept, accept trap The definition of vibe coding - trust the process, let it make errors and recover

"press pay to think for me button" "press pay to think for me button" "press pay to think for me button" "press pay to think for me button" "press pay to think for me button" I love it

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#25

Post by figassis » Fri, May 16, 2025, 10:07 AM UTC

blixt wrote: post #8

> Enabled from the insight from our heavily-used Windsurf Editor, we got to work building a completely new data model (the shared timeline) and a training recipe that encapsulates incomplete states, long-running tasks, and multiple surfaces. This data is very valuable if you're trying to create fully automated SWEs, while most foundation model providers have probably been scraping together second hand data to simulat…

And is probably why OpenAI paid $$$ to acquire

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#26

Post by Archonical » Fri, May 16, 2025, 10:11 AM UTC

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #21

anshumankmr wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be underestimating the barrier to hiring the really smart people. Open AI/Google etc would be hiring and poaching people like crazy, offering cushy bonuses and TCs that would make blow your mind.(Like say Noam Brown at Open AI) And some of the more ambitious ones would start their own ventures (like say Ilya etc.). That being said I am sure a lot of the so called wrapper companies are paying insanely well t…

FAANGMULA ... Microsoft, Uber?, L??, Anthropic? Who's the L?

Lyft.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#27

Post by lemming » Fri, May 16, 2025, 10:13 AM UTC

blixt wrote: post #8

> Enabled from the insight from our heavily-used Windsurf Editor, we got to work building a completely new data model (the shared timeline) and a training recipe that encapsulates incomplete states, long-running tasks, and multiple surfaces. This data is very valuable if you're trying to create fully automated SWEs, while most foundation model providers have probably been scraping together second hand data to simulat…

The company that is best placed to collect tons of high quality data of this type is undoubtedly Google. They’ve had publications talking about how they capture data from their in house SWE tools and use it to improve their tooling.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#28

Post by whywhywhywhy » Fri, May 16, 2025, 10:31 AM UTC

anshumankmr wrote: post #17

rfoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mid/post training does not cost that much, except maybe large scale RL, but even this is more of an infra problem. If anything, the cost is mostly in running various experiments (i.e. the process of doing research). It is very puzzling why "wrapper" companies don't (and religiously say they won't ever) do something on this front. The only barrier is talents.

You might be underestimating the barrier to hiring the really smart people. Open AI/Google etc would be hiring and poaching people like crazy, offering cushy bonuses and TCs that would make blow your mind.(Like say Noam Brown at Open AI) And some of the more ambitious ones would start their own ventures (like say Ilya etc.). That being said I am sure a lot of the so called wrapper companies are paying insanely well t…

Any half decent and methodical software engineer can fine tune/repurpose a model if you have the data and the money to burn on compute and experiment runs, which they do.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#29

Post by whywhywhywhy » Fri, May 16, 2025, 10:57 AM UTC

blixt wrote: post #8

> Enabled from the insight from our heavily-used Windsurf Editor, we got to work building a completely new data model (the shared timeline) and a training recipe that encapsulates incomplete states, long-running tasks, and multiple surfaces. This data is very valuable if you're trying to create fully automated SWEs, while most foundation model providers have probably been scraping together second hand data to simulat…

There is a world where the wrapper makers surpass the current model makers in their area of focus. Cursor/Windsurf have all the data on when people got so frustrated with Claude they switched to Gemini/GPT and also all the data of when the problem was actually solved and when it wasn't.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#30

Post by jstummbillig » Fri, May 16, 2025, 10:59 AM UTC

firejake308 wrote: post #2

I'm confused why they are working on their own frontier models if they are going to be bought by OpenAI anyway. I guess this is something they were working on before the announcement?

Why would OpenAI not let smart people work on models? That seems to be what they do. The point is: They are no longer "their own" models. They are now OpenAI models. If they suck, if they are redundant, if there is no idea there that makes sense, that effort will not continue indefinitely.