Openaai appears to be concerning the largest public acquisition with an agreement so far, which was bought by the acquisition of Windsurf, the software developer tool, which was bought by large language models (LLMS) after $ 3 billion after $ 3 billion. Bloomberg (Paywalled Yahoo reprint).
Rumors have been whirling around such a deal for weeks, but now it seems to occur today, May sixth, 2025, Windsurf CEO and co-founder Varun Mohan posting on x last night: “Big announcement tomorrow!”
According to Bloomberg, the deal should “help” to open the increasing competition available on the market for AI-controlled coding assistants to open tasks equivalent to writing code based on natural language “, and Windsurf was in discussions with risk capital corporations in discussions with a risk capital company last yr in the quantity of three US dollar.
The startup, previously generally known as exafe function and later code, was founded in 2021 by the graduates of MIT, Varun Mohan and Douglas Chen, initially as a “safety-focused LLM toolkit, which within the context of codebase provides intelligent code suggestions last yr.
When more users won November 2024A fork of Microsoft Visual Studio CodeAnd the renaming of the corporate afterwards. Windsurf is reported now has greater than 800,000 developer users and 1,000 corporations as customers.
It is way from the one game in the town on the subject of LLM-operated Ides and developer tools: Openaai According to reports in discussions to purchase one other very similar and competing startup cursorAnd in fact there are also Amazon's Q Developer and Github Copilot. But of their opinion, everyone seems to be shared that LLM and AI models will change software development and code in blinking of an eye fixed for the foreseeable future that human developers need for minutes, hours or days for manually.
What will occur to Windsurf's support and offer of non -open LLMs?
For users, integration with Openai will undoubtedly raise questions.
Part of the attraction of windsurf is that it’s a little bit of a model, because developers who use it might probably select with LLM who wish to show you how to write code.
At the moment, It offers several large -speaking model options For the chat interface, including a custom windsurf-based basis, which is a finely coordinated variant of METAS LAMA 3.1 70B, the Premier model relies on the larger LLAMA 3.1 405b from Meta and is integrated into the interior argument tools of windsurf to support more complex tasks, especially within the coding.
Subscribers can even access external models, equivalent to the Openai of GPT-4O and the Claude 3.5 sonet from Anthropic, in order that model selection enables flexibility depending on the appliance.
Will Openai attempt to remove the choice for users outside of LLMS and to limit them to Openais model families equivalent to GPT-4O, O3, O4 etc.?
We'll see, but I doubt it since the Windsurf business has succeeded partially on the premise of the pliability of the tools. It would probably also raise complaints about competitive business measures and will even result in some potential complaints.
A use and a knowledge game that ought to strengthen OpenAis models against competitors within the coding area?
Instead, i’d imagine that openai is taking a look at the windsurf acquisition as a meeans not only of acquiring a well-liked development tool that plays well with own models, but as a approach to gather tons of user and usage data – and from this, it coildh see what sort of Developers use rival models As the meta llama variants and anthropic's claude, and for what purposes, and Seek to be certain that new edition of openai's own llms are competitive on these fronts.
In any case, it’s a “big freakin deal” former president Joe Biden- and It will undoubtedly have many far-reaching ripple effects in the complete user base of windsurf and the broader pool of developers and AI-driven developer tools.
The Discord server from Windsurf has already been full of contributions from users who affect the worst effect -an increase in prices or latest access substances that restrict their use to Chatgpt subscribers or Openai -API developers.
We will track and report what we uncover, which is helpful for technical decision -makers. Stay tuned!
