On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops fashionable AI instruments for software program engineers, announced the launch of its first household of AI software program engineering fashions, or SWE-1 for brief. The startup says it educated its new household of AI fashions — SWE-1, SWE-1-lite, and SWE-1-mini — to be optimized for the “complete software program engineering course of,” not simply coding.
The launch of Windsurf’s in-house AI fashions might come as a shock to some, provided that OpenAI has reportedly closed a $3 billion deal to acquire Windsurf. Nevertheless, this mannequin launch suggests Windsurf is attempting to develop past simply growing functions to additionally growing the fashions that energy them.
According to Windsurf, SWE-1, the biggest and most succesful AI mannequin of the bunch, performs competitively with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Professional on inside programming benchmarks. Nevertheless, SWE-1 seems to fall wanting frontier AI fashions, reminiscent of Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on software program engineering duties.
Windsurf says its SWE-1-lite and SWE-1-mini fashions will probably be obtainable for all customers on its platform, free or paid. In the meantime, SWE-1 will solely be obtainable to paid customers. Windsurf didn’t instantly announce pricing for its SWE-1 fashions however claims it’s cheaper to serve than Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
Windsurf is greatest recognized for instruments that enable software program engineers to put in writing and edit code by conversations with an AI chatbot, a apply referred to as “vibe coding.” Different fashionable vibe-coding startups embrace Cursor, the biggest within the house, in addition to Lovable. Most of those startups, together with Windsurf, have historically relied on AI fashions from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to energy their functions.
In a video asserting the SWE fashions, feedback made by Windsurf’s Head of Analysis, Nicholas Moy, underscore Windsurf’s latest efforts to distinguish its method. “Right now’s frontier fashions are optimized for coding, and so they’ve made huge strides during the last couple of years,” says Moy. “However they’re not sufficient for us … Coding isn’t software program engineering.”
Windsurf notes in a weblog put up that whereas different fashions are good at writing code, they wrestle to work between a number of surfaces — as programmers usually do — reminiscent of terminals, IDEs, and the web. The startup says SWE-1 was educated utilizing a brand new information mannequin and a “coaching recipe that encapsulates incomplete states, long-running duties, and a number of surfaces.”
The startup describes SWE-1 as its “preliminary proof of idea,” suggesting it might launch extra AI fashions sooner or later.
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