【Big Thing Chief: The Stolen Wife】

OpenAI is Big Thing Chief: The Stolen Wifebuying AI startup Windsurf for the tidy sum of $3 billion.

This is according to a Bloomberg report Tuesday, which claims that the two companies have reached an agreement but that the deal "has not yet closed," with Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter. If accurate, this would be OpenAI's largest acquisition to date.

Windsurf is an artificial intelligence app that focuses on coding. Formerly known as Codeium, Windsurf is self-described as "the future of software development."

Notably, the news arrived just a day after the OpenAI — the $300 billion company, that is — announced it would remain under control of OpenAI, the nonprofit.

Perhaps even more notably, OpenAI's reported acquisition of Windsurf comes just after Anysphere, which makes the AI coding tool Cursor, reportedly raised $900 million, at a valuation of $9 billion.

What does this mean for ChatGPT?

OpenAI's signature AI chatbot ChatGPT is already a useful tool for coding in its own right. The Pro version offers a few features aimed specifically for developers, including a code interpreter and a live editing, collaborative coding tool called Canvas.

The competition, however, is strong. Anthropic, which makes AI assistant Claude, Microsoft, which owns Github, as well as Anysphere's Cursor, all offer a few of their own AI tools or features that aid programmers.

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Windsurf, in particular, offers Cascade, a chat-based tool that monitors your project's progress, offers suggestions, and detects issues with your code. The company also offers Windsurf Previews, which can run a preview of a website you're building, allowing you to make changes on the fly.

Given that OpenAI and Windsurf declined to comment on Bloomberg's story, it's too early to tell how OpenAI plans to integrate Windsurf's capabilities, should the deal go through. We wouldn't be too surprised if tools such as Cascade and Previews make way into ChatGPT in the future, though.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.