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Comment by MPSimmons

13 hours ago

It reportedly has a $2B ARR, and a 5x multiplier doesn't seem insane to me, but who knows, honestly

They have 2B ARR because their business model is about selling models cheaper than they cost.

The main frenzy with Cursor started when you could access Anthropic models practically for free.

Otherwise it is just VS Code.

  • > Otherwise it is just VS Code.

    This is a bit simplistic. It's the VS Code that everyone used before cc came to town. Real devs, on real projects. All that data they collected is worth a lot more than "just vscode". Their composer2 is better than kimi2.5 and it's just a finetune on that data.

    xAI had a decent model in grok4 (it was even sota on a bunch of benchmarks for a few weeks), but they didn't have great coding models (code-fast was ok-ish but nothing to write home about, certainly nowhere near SotA). Now that they've been banned from using claude, they'll get their expertise + data to build a coding model on top of whatever grok5 will be + their cluster for compute.

    It doesn't sound like a bad plan to me, financial shenanigans or not.

  • xAI needs a dev tool to compete with Codex and Claude Code.

    Cursor needs their own 1st party backend model.

    Sounds like a match made in heaven.

    • Not quite first party, but composer 2 is far superior to grok for coding. Unless you're eluding to them using SpaceX infra to train their own model vs. using grok