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Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

windsurf.com

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Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#4

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?

Getting more money perhaps also, if they believed their model to be good, and had amassed some good training data Open AI can leverage, apart from the user base.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#5

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?

It seems OpenAI acquired Windsurf but is letting it operate independently, keeping its own brand and developing its own coding models. That way, if Windsurf runs into technical problems, the backlash lands on Windsurf—not OpenAI. It’s a smart way to innovate while keeping the main brand safe.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#6

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?

It seems OpenAI acquired Windsurf but is letting it operate independently, keeping its own brand and developing its own coding models. That way, if Windsurf runs into technical problems, the backlash lands on Windsurf—not OpenAI. It’s a smart way to innovate while keeping the main brand safe.

But doesn't this mean they have twice the costs in training? I was under the impression that was still the most expensive part of these companies' balance.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems OpenAI acquired Windsurf but is letting it operate independently, keeping its own brand and developing its own coding models. That way, if Windsurf runs into technical problems, the backlash lands on Windsurf—not OpenAI. It’s a smart way to innovate while keeping the main brand safe.

But doesn't this mean they have twice the costs in training? I was under the impression that was still the most expensive part of these companies' balance.

It's very unlikely that they're doing their own pre-training, which is the longest and most expensive part of creating a frontier model (if they were, they'd likely brag about it).

Most likely they built this as a post-train of an open model that is already strong on coding like Qwen 2.5.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#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 simulate long horizon engineering work. Cursor probably has way more of this data, and I wonder how Microsoft's own Copilot is doing (and how they share this data with the foundation model providers)...

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#9
it was only a matter of time, they have too much good data to not train their own models, not to mention that claude API calls were probably killing their profitability.

open source alternative https://huggingface.co/SWE-bench/SWE-agent-LM-32B

though I haven't been able to find a mlx quant that wasn't completely broken.

Re: Windsurf SWE-1: Our First Frontier Models

#10

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?

openAI models have an issue where they are pretty good at everything but not incredible at anything. They're too well rounded.

for coding you use anthropic or google models, I haven't found anyone who swears by openAI models for coding... Their reasoning models are either too expensive or hallucinate massively to the point of being useless... I would assume the gpt 4.1 family will be popular for SWE's

Having a smaller scope model (agentic coding only) allows for much cheaper inference and windsurf building its own moat (so far agentic IDE's haven't had a moat)

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