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OpenAI reaches agreement to buy Windsurf for $3B

bloomberg.com

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

#451

Post by conartist6 »

raincole wrote: post #443
retornam wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If enterprises require fewer software engineers, where will the market for IDE development wrappers come from?

Enterprises won't require less software. If they require fewer software engineers, that would be those few engineers producing so much more software with better tools, for example, AI wrappers.

Yeah but we can already see that it doesn't work like that.

If you need to write a lot of code I guess, but that's really rare, like saying "I need to write a lot of laws. I need to write 50 new laws by Tuesday with at least 15000 words of new regulation to one-up my rival legislator who wrote 40 new laws last week"

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

#453

Post by SwtCyber »

bko wrote: post #29

Incredible timeline to a $3B exit > Windsurf began in 2021 as Exafunction, founded by MIT graduates Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen. The company initially focused on GPU optimization before pivoting to AI-assisted coding tools, launching Codeium, which later evolved into Windsurf. > Series B (January 2024): $65 million at a $500 million valuation. > Series C (September 2024): $150 million, led by General Catalyst, at a…

Totally agree - a lot of the "magic" still feels like it boils down to whoever has the best underlying model

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

#454

Post by SwtCyber »

resters wrote: post #89

- A $3B signal that OpenAI is unable to do product - AI assisted coding is mostly about managing the context and knowing what to put in the context to avoid confusion and dumb mistakes, it's not about the UI. - This signals that OpenAI believes that highly effective coding assistant LLMs will become a commodity / open source and so UI / tooling lock-in is a good investment.

Yeah, this feels less like a "we can't build it" move and more like a "we can't afford to wait" one

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

#455

Post by SwtCyber »

herval wrote: post #143
resters wrote: post #89

- A $3B signal that OpenAI is unable to do product - AI assisted coding is mostly about managing the context and knowing what to put in the context to avoid confusion and dumb mistakes, it's not about the UI. - This signals that OpenAI believes that highly effective coding assistant LLMs will become a commodity / open source and so UI / tooling lock-in is a good investment.

chatgpt is massively popular, I'm not sure that's the signal I'd get they're acquiring one of the biggest the front doors to developers, with Windsurf - whether it'll _remain_ in fashion or not, that's a different debate. This can be like facebook acquiring instagram (if developers turn out to be the actual profit-driver niche for LLMs, which currently seems to be the case)

ChatGPT's popularity doesn't automatically translate into dev adoption

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

#456

Post by SwtCyber »

lolinder wrote: post #40

The next step for Cursor and Windsurf both is that they need to work together to provide an answer for what it means to be a VS Code fork in the new era where Microsoft is trying to strangle the forks. If they're not already they should be teaming up with each other and with the VSCodium team and with the Open VSX marketplace. Microsoft is an existential threat to their model here, but with the money they each have c…

There's a real opportunity here to build a sustainable, open ecosystem for AI-powered dev tools - but it's going to require actual coordination, not just parallel efforts

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

#457

Post by conartist6 »

camdenreslink wrote: post #418
retornam wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your assertion was true, we would see a hiring boom across the board, instead of mass layoffs and hiring freezes throughout our industry

LLMs aren't the cause of mass layoffs and hiring freezes. The end of ZIRP, uncertainty in the macro and offshoring are the cause. AI is just something executives like to say recently when they do layoffs ("we'll be more efficient with cutting edge technology!").

I think there's real pressure from investors to show that some of your human costs will be going away.

After all most of those investors are deeply invested in AI technology already. At the valuation, they need to be able to show that it replaces human workers because that's the specific kind of greed that is driving the value of the stock.

And if you see your competition tighten their belt then you should tighten yours right? So without proof companies are acting like they can use a small number of human-ai hybrid workers. There's strong peer pressure to think that way as a direct result of AI

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

#458

Post by john-h-k »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #438
john-h-k wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was this written by an LLM? Not accusative but something about the vibe strongly suggests it

This is beginnings of AI discrimination. If an answer is written by an LLM but equal or superior in quality to a human answer why question or disparage it? I don't know but it looks like you're probably a white guy. Your mannerisms and vibes make it look like you're white. Nothing wrong with this, just wanted to point it out. See what I'm saying. It's like the blade runner movies.

I find this comment odd but not at all discriminatory and will happily inform that yes, I am white British. I can see the point you’re going for but I do think it’s more complex than that. I don’t think LLMs are equivalent to another human race. Principally, LLMs have many pretty major differences to humans which you don’t really see at the inter-racial level. Secondly the reasoning for why asking someone their race in this context would be weird involved a lot of human history. If you’d asked my height or eye colour there’s nothing discriminatory feeling about that. That historical context doesn’t exist with LLMs

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

#459

Post by kaptainscarlet »

peteforde wrote: post #229
oefrha wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differentiator of Cursor is it’s way smarter at basic code completion than GitHub Copilot. I pay for Cursor instead of GitHub Copilot even though I get the latter for free from open source contributions, and I made that decision after five minutes of usage after using Copilot for what, more than a year? I won’t even talk about how Cursor guesses where I’m going to edit next and makes the correct edit most of the…

Same. Cursor might be the only tool I've purchased a year's subscription to before the end of my free trial. I've tried just about every model on its own over the years, and yet there's something about the Cursor workflow that frequently still gives me chills when it shows me again that it had clearly anticipated what I would think next in a way I just don't experience with other tools. Holistic seems like the right…

Windsurf does it all the time like a wife of 40yrs completing your sentences. A good example is when you remove a function parameter. It automatically prompts to remove the arguments in all usages of the function, saving me a lot of time.
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