OpenAI in Talks to Buy Windsurf for About $3B | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI in Talks to Buy Windsurf for About $3B

bloomberg.com

60 pointsmfiguiere44 comments

I don't get it, surely they can build it for less than $3B, and why would they need the Windsurf brand?

Maybe ChatGPT told them it was a good idea? Considering the proliferation of these tools there's no way it's worth $3B. This functionality is going to be built into every IDE eventually: vscode just got an agent mode, it might not be great yet but it's only a matter of time until Windsurf is essentially just management tools because there won't be much editor value add available.

Precisely. For most users, there is hardly value in moving off of VSCode. Granted, if Windsurf can make itself into a VSCode extension, there may be some competitive value to it.

Isn’t Windsurf a VSCode-based IDE anyway (just like Cursor)? Basing it off the screenshots from their website.

I haven’t tried it, but if it is similar to Cursor (which I tried), then it hardly counts as “moving off VSCode”, which was one of the reasons I found switching to it easy. Cannot even really call it a move, if I can just quickly export-import all of my VSCode settings over (including themes and extensions), and they will all pretty much “just work” the exact same way and autoupdate from the exact same extension hub out of the box. Hell, even the UI is pretty much the same, so everything feels familiar, and i can be at least just as productive as usual immediately.

One of the biggest wins of VSCode (to me personally) is how functionally interoperable it is with other IDEs that are built off it.

The "Windsurf" brand has little value in comparison to OpenAI's, but $3B lets them hit the ground running with a proven developer product (better than Cursor IMHO), the team who created it, and a customer base.

With stuff like this, they like the team that built it and want them on their side.

If you believe the founders/team is the right group to deliver a core product 3b is nothing to get them onside.

There is literally never a context in which 3b is “nothing”. Not even for a company that just raised 40b.

If investors think that the acquisition will increase the valuation of the company by 3B (or more), and the acquisition is paid fully or mostly in stock - then one can it basically for free.

It's obvious they can't build it for $3b, otherwise they would've created a competitor already.

The only official-ish statement I’ve seen on this:

> Hey all this is speculation, probably stemming from earlier in the week when we had the joint livestream with OpenAI.

> There’s a ton of interest and attention on Windsurf rn which is awesome, but we are 100 percent focused on building amazing products.

> Not sure where this article came from, but we have some amazing updates next week that are gonna blow your socks off

https://old.reddit.com/r/windsurf/s/0CR07Qwkf9

I use Windsurf, but I only use Claude, it's just worked far better for me than OpenAI's models.

Sure, why not? If OpenAI wants to have their own social network, might as well have their own IDE too.

This would make a lot of sense for both sides I think. Owning the part of the stack that decides where the inference requests go is like Google owning the browser.

Didn't Windsurf just come out a few months ago? Wish I could read the article to understand how that number was reached.

It's not Adobe Dreamweaver with a chatbot plus a DAG-style job GUI, it's an agentic IDE ecosystem for $3B. But seriously, what am I missing here?

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