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Comment by firesteelrain | Hacker News Reader

Windsurf/Codeium has an enterprise version that can be used by corporations to provide AI assisted coding environments using their own HW stack (non cloud). This is beneficial for privacy and proprietary reasons especially if your data cannot be exfiltrated off premises. The hardware recommended to run Codeium is a lot cheaper than if you were to have 700 developers generate tokens. This model has the chance to generate many paying customers. Whether that has a $40b market cap is unclear

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I don’t think the utility of Windsurf was the question. There is clearly a benefit for a tool/service like this.

The questions raised by the article (as I saw it) were price and timing. $3B is a lot. Is that overpaying for something with a known value but limited reach? Not to mention competitors with deep pockets. And the other question is - why now? What was to be gained by OpenAI by buying Windsuf now.

It’s a Copilot competitor and it’s used by Zillow, Dell, and Anduril (newish Defense company). Cursor can’t work in airgapped environments right now. I don’t know what Codeium charges to run an on prem licensed version but they boast over 1000 enterprise customers. Codeium is on a rapid growth trajectory from $1.25b to $2.85b in such a short period.

Codeium can be fine tuned. Though it’s trained on similar open source it does provide assurances that they do not inadvertently train on wrongly licensed software code.

https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does...

Thanks, I had a feeling it may be something like this since it seemed like they were investing more in enterprise. That said, do they do better than copilot on this? Surely msft has more experience and ability to execute in that market?

Codeium's completion model is better than whatever GitHub Copilot has. For me it's Cursor > Codeium >>> Copilot. Yes, Copilot is that bad.

And yes Codeium/Windsurf focuses on enterprise customers more. As GP said they have an on-prem [0], a hybrid SaaS offering and enterprise features that just make sense (e.g. pooled credits). Their support team is more responsive (compared to Anysphere). Windsurf also "feels" more finished than Cursor.

[0] but ultimately if you want to "vibe-coding" you have to call Claude API

Ok thanks, that was my follow-up -- I assumed that airgap implementations are significantly worse because they can't back into Claude or Gemini

Codeium can be fine tuned. Though it’s trained on similar open source it does provide assurances that they do not inadvertently train on wrongly licensed software code.

https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does...

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