OpenAI plans to acquire the AI startup Windsurf for $3 billion in order to dominate the field of AI programming.

OpenAI is in talks to acquire the AI programming startup Windsurf for as much as $3 billion, according to reports from sources familiar with the matter cited by the media. Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, has been competing fiercely with another popular AI programming tool, Cursor, as well as existing AI programming assistance features from companies like Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI in the field of AI programming. CNBC has confirmed that OpenAI is in talks to acquire the AI programming startup Windsurf for approximately $3 billion. Bloomberg first reported this potential blockbuster deal, and CNBC later confirmed the news with a source familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because negotiations are still ongoing. Against the backdrop of increasingly fierce competition in the global generative AI field, OpenAI is stepping up its pace to maintain its absolute leadership in AI large models and generative AI applications. Its competitors include Google, Anthropic, and xAI, a company founded and led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, among others, who are all heavily investing and continuously releasing updated generative AI products. At the end of last month, OpenAI completed a funding round worth as much as $40 billion, bringing its latest valuation to $300 billion, setting a record for the highest valuation ever in the private tech company and global generative AI field. OpenAI is accelerating the pace of updates and iterations for its globally leading AI large models and generative AI applications, continuously developing comprehensive AI large models and related AI applications that rank first globally, and increasing its efforts in the field of AI programming, the hottest sub-sector of generative AI applications currently - this is why OpenAI is willing to offer up to $3 billion to try to acquire the AI programming startup Windsurf. On Wednesday of this week, OpenAI shockingly unveiled two highly anticipated AI large models and their corresponding generative AI applications - its latest full-blooded versions o3 and o4-mini series reasoning large models and the latest generative AI application products. OpenAI emphasized during the live launch event that the new AI large models have the ability to "think in images", meaning they can deeply understand and comprehensively analyze sketches and diagrams provided by users, even if the quality of these images is very low. In addition, OpenAI also open-sourced the Codex CLI programming artifact at the new product launch event, a lightweight focus programming AI agent that can run in the terminal. If a deal is reached with Windsurf, it will be OpenAI's largest acquisition to date. Previously, OpenAI had made several smaller acquisitions, including the acquisition of analytics database provider Rockset and video collaboration platform Multi in June last year. Back as early as 2023, OpenAI acquired Global Illumination. According to a blog post at the time of the announcement, the company "leveraged AI to build innovative creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences". However, the terms of these transactions were not disclosed. Who is Windsurf? Like Cursor, Replit, and other AI programming assistance tools, Windsurf, formerly known as Codeium, is one of the platforms that developers have been flocking to for "vibe coding" in recent months, a term referring to using AI large models to quickly compose the underlying code for new software. OpenAI's co-founder, Andrej Karpathy, first introduced this term in a post on the social media site X in February of this year. Earlier this month, Microsoft also announced that its popular text editor Visual Studio Code would introduce a similar AI programming feature called Agent Mode. Windsurf (formerly Codeium) is an AI startup based in Mountain View, California, focusing on developing next-generation AI programming tools and AI agent integrated development environments. The core AI programming product under Windsurf is its proprietary AI programming platform ecosystem, which aims to support developers with the following AI features: Cascade, an intelligent agent that understands developers' intentions, automatically generates, modifies code, and runs and debugs programs when necessary; Supercomplete goes beyond traditional autocomplete functions, providing context-aware and precise predictive code suggestions to improve code writing efficiency; Memories function records users' coding habits and project characteristics, with context-aware autosave features to provide personalized suggestions and automated precise operations; Windsurf Tab provides more intelligent, relevant suggestions by tracking users' command history and clipboard content. Windsurf also integrates with a variety of mainstream software tools and SaaS subscription services, such as GitHub, Figma, Slack, Stripe, etc., providing developers with a one-stop development experience. Windsurf's investors include Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Greenoaks, and Kleiner Perkins. TechCrunch reported in February of this year that Windsurf was raising funds at a valuation of $28.5 billion. Undoubtedly, Windsurf is currently a leader in the field of AI programming, especially in providing a "proxy-style" AI programming experience. After being acquired by OpenAI, OpenAI will have the opportunity to further enhance its capabilities in the field of AI programming. With a powerful generative AI ecosystem and deep integration with OpenAI's programming agent Codex CLI, it is expected to firmly occupy the dominant position in the market share of the AI programming field and lead the core position in the global development of AI programming.The innovative capabilities and product performance of Windsurf give it broad growth prospects in the field of AI programming. The products introduced by Windsurf are considered to be the first truly agent-based IDE, capable of actively understanding and assisting developers in completing various extremely complex coding tasks required to develop software systems. Compared to other AI programming tools, Windsurf provides deeper code understanding and more efficient automation, widely recognized by developers. Full-blooded o3 and o4-mini explode! OpenAI integrates image reasoning into AI reasoning chains for the first time The full-blooded o3 released by OpenAI on Wednesday, as well as the next-generation inference large model o4-mini, can autonomously judge and combine the built-in tools of ChatGPT, generating more detailed and comprehensive answers compared to previous versions of inference large models. The core new AI features include searching the web, analyzing uploaded files and data using Python, deep reasoning on visual inputs, and even generating images. In benchmark tests such as Codeforces, SWE-bench, and MMMU, o3 sets a new benchmark, whether in programming, mathematics, science, or visual perception. Particularly in the areas of image, chart, and graphic analysis, the performance of the o3 large model is outstanding, capable of delving into the details of visual inputs. Compared to the full-blooded o3, o4-mini stands out for its compactness, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. In the AIME 2025 test, o4-mini achieved a high score of 99.5% when paired with a Python interpreter, nearly perfecting this benchmark test. Furthermore, in mathematics, programming, visual tasks, and non-STEM fields, its performance surpasses that of o3-mini. Additionally, o4-mini supports a usage quota far beyond that of o3, making it the optimal choice for high-frequency AI usage scenarios. o3 and o4-mini comprehensively surpass their predecessors in visual reasoning capabilities, becoming the most powerful visual reasoning models in the o series. They have innovatively used images for reasoning in the AI reasoning chain (CoT) for the first time, achieving a significant breakthrough in visual perception. OpenAI has achieved the use of large models in its reasoning chain for AI reasoning and thinking using images for the first time, and it's not just about looking at pictures. Similar to early versions of OpenAI o1, o3 and o4-mini can think longer before answering and generate long reasoning chains internally before responding to the user. Additionally, o3 and o4-mini can show how to analyze images and automatically combine some images closely related to the user's question during the thinking process to provide a more comprehensive and in-depth analysis for resolving user queries. This capability can be achieved through tools to process user-uploaded images, such as cropping, zooming, rotating, etc. These features are native to o3 and o4-mini's reasoning large models, without the need for additional specialized models. In benchmark tests, the ability of o3 and o4-mini to think using images without relying on web browsing surpasses the performance of previous multimodal models.