OpenAI Reaches Agreement to Buy Windsurf for $3B

45 swyx 7 5/6/2025, 12:57:48 AM bloomberg.com ↗

Comments (7)

bionhoward · 4h ago
Dumb, fail for user freedom, nothing owned by OpenAI can be used to … create AI or anything that competes with them: scheduled AI, AI agents, AI tools, AI coding, chat, audio, image gen, video gen, shopping, and oh, anything the AI can do, soon social networking and hardware, what’s left that doesn’t compete with these assholes?

ChatGPT is a great breakthrough but it’s wasted if everyone has to worry about a noncompete with it. Seriously, how is it not insane to think we should outsource our thoughts and agree never to use the thoughts to compete with the thinker? Who wants to live in a world where nobody thinks and nobody can make anything competitive with their “Saviour Machine?”

Anybody who would join an org like that for a few billion dollars is a sell out. It’s an AI safety nightmare, too. I’m just flabbergasted millions of noobs accept not to compete with intelligence, wtf is this world, if you can’t use your thoughts to compete with your thinker, what is left for you? lol this is worse than black mirror

bartimus · 1h ago
They didn't even buy an IDE since windsurf is more like a VS code plugin.

So what was it exactly that was worth the 3B that they couldn't replicate themselves? Their prompts? Their training sets? Their users or user data?

thomasfromcdnjs · 1h ago
I'd guess the prompts and employees.

I've found Windsurf more reliable/efficient than any other editors by leagues. How ever they have named the tools, crafted their prompts and generally how their internals reason is just on the money. I don't think that is easy to replicate, iterating on prompts over product releases whilst not pissing off your user base constantly is a feat in of itself.

bartimus · 6m ago
Then perhaps it's about bringing in the human talent that wrote those prompts.
dtagames · 6h ago
jeanlucas · 4h ago
oh wow, meaning I won't need to pay for Windsurf? What do you think will be the monetization path for this?
nialse · 1h ago
Probably the other way around. Windsurf and co (Aider, Cursor) drives a heap of traffic to their API from which OpenAI actually profit. They just need to have their own tool to lock customers in their ecosystem.