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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

#531

Post by walthamstow »

sdwr wrote: post #396
lolinder wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define losing? My company pays for Copilot but not for Cursor, and it's not at all clear to me that we're the exception rather than the norm. What numbers and data are you working with?

Copilot has every incumbent advantage, so if Cursor is doing halfway decent in the market (which it is), it's winning by default

Incumbent advantage of being in VS Code already? Thing is, Cursor is basically just VS Code, there's hardly any barrier to switching, so it's quite a weak advantage.

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

#533

Post by empath75 »

retornam wrote: post #240

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…

> when it depends on API services it doesn't own

It now owns the API services.

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

#534

Post by resters »

CryptoBanker wrote: post #344
resters wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While malpractice insurance exists for human docs and lawyers, there is not really any difference between an ai-powered lawyer drawing up a contract, an ai-powered doc reviewing a chart and recommending next steps, and a self-driving car making a turn. The most obviously "lethal" case (cars) is already in large scale rollout worldwide. At scale, self-driving car "errors" will fall under general liability insurance co…

> LLMs already write better prose than 95% of humans and models like o3 reason better than 90% of humans on many tasks. Except except lawyers are ~.4%[1] of the population in the United States, so that 95% isn’t very impressive [1] https://www.americanbar.org/news/profile-legal-profession/de...

Fair point, but how much billable legal work requires that caliber of skill? I'd argue that 80% of it could probably be done with an o3 or o4 caliber model with some safeguards built into the pipeline and perhaps a bit of specialized training or MoE guardrails, human review, etc.

I think the mistake people make is misunderstanding the slope of the S-curve and instead quibbling over the exact nature of the current reality. AI is moving very fast. A few years ago I'd have said that at most 25% of legal work could fall to AI.

Note that this massive change happened in less time than it takes to educate one class of law school grads!

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

#535

Post by [deleted] »

rpgbr wrote: post #268
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…

It's a bubble about to pop. That's where the value is coming from.

[deleted]

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

#536

Post by bwfan123 »

globnomulous wrote: post #530
retornam wrote: post #240

I'm skeptical about this VSCode fork commanding a $3 billion valuation when it depends on API services it doesn't own. What's their moat here? For comparison, JetBrains generates over $400 million in annual revenue and is valued around $7 billion. They've built proprietary technology and deep expertise in that market over decades. If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers…

> If AI (terminology aside) replaces many professional software engineers and programmers like some of its fierce advocates say it would, wouldn't their potential customer base shrink? This is such a good point. The best reply available to the AI hype-men would probably be that LLMs "democratize" coding and therefore that even more people will use IDEs in the future, but that sounds like BS to me -- not unlike AI/hyp…

indeed, and that is why you see adobe declining, because, their customer base is shrinking even as they add AI into their tools.

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

#537

Post by itchyjunk »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #415
djha-skin wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did powered table saws replace carpenters?

Yes. That's the problem. You think the answer is no, but the answer is actually yes.

Could you elaborate? Power saw operators replaced traditional carpenter?

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

#538

Post by alexchantavy »

conartist6 wrote: post #448
alexchantavy wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, in the recent Lightcone Podcast episode, Varun was talking about how they have a lean eng team but large sales org. I thought that was super interesting for a dev tool since I was expecting a dev tool to involve bottom-up sales to the dev instead of top-down sales to a leader like a CTO or VP of Eng

It will be super interesting to see how they do against the inverse: an engineering-focused company that wants to win devs from the bottom up

100%. You're referring to Cursor?

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

#539

Post by resters »

__loam wrote: post #391
resters wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While malpractice insurance exists for human docs and lawyers, there is not really any difference between an ai-powered lawyer drawing up a contract, an ai-powered doc reviewing a chart and recommending next steps, and a self-driving car making a turn. The most obviously "lethal" case (cars) is already in large scale rollout worldwide. At scale, self-driving car "errors" will fall under general liability insurance co…

If AI is so good at prose, why haven't I heard about any breakout best sellers?

openAI models are good at solid, fluent academic style prose. DeepSeek R1 can sound fresh and can use more "voices" that feel authentic to the reader. Grok-3 is close behind.

Writing good prose is a far different skill than coming up with a compelling and innovative plot and style.

As a data point, OpenAI now blocks o3 from doing the "continue where the story left off" test on works of fiction. It says "Sorry, I can't do that".

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

#540

Post by resters »

SwtCyber wrote: post #454
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

> "we can't afford to wait"

True, but how long does it take to build something similar? I see it as a defensive move, probably good for the industry to let some people with innovative ideas in AI cash out now so they can do the next thing.

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