Comment by xnx
11 hours ago
> The reason is that there is no secret sauce and 95% of the magic is in the LLM itself
Makes that "$3 billion" valuation for Windsurf very suspect
11 hours ago
> The reason is that there is no secret sauce and 95% of the magic is in the LLM itself
Makes that "$3 billion" valuation for Windsurf very suspect
Indeed. But keep in mind they weren't just buying the tooling - they get the team, the brand, and the positional authority as well. OpenAI could have spun up a team to build an agent code IDE, and they would have been starting on the back foot with users, would have been compared to Cursor/Windsurf...
The price tag is hefty but I figure it'll work out for them on the backside because they won't have to fight so hard to capture TAM.
The value in the windsurf acquisition isn't the code they've written, it's the ability to see what people are coding and use that information to build better LLMs. -- Product development.