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In recent developments within the tech industry, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was present at an event at Station F in Paris, coinciding with the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. Before pursuing the acquisition of the AI coding tool Windsurf, OpenAI had initially shown interest in acquiring another startup, Cursor, which is owned by Anysphere.
According to sources familiar with the situation, OpenAI contacted Anysphere last year regarding the Cursor application, and followed up this year as Cursor experienced a surge in popularity. Despite these attempts, discussions did not progress, as reported by CNBC.
OpenAI has chosen not to comment on these discussions, and Anysphere has yet to respond to requests for information. Recently, Bloomberg indicated that Anysphere is in the process of raising funds, potentially reaching a valuation close to $10 billion.
In more pertinent news, OpenAI is currently in discussions to acquire Windsurf for approximately $3 billion, following a report by Bloomberg. Should this acquisition proceed, it would represent OpenAI’s largest purchase to date.
On social media platform X, Altman announced the release of new reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, highlighting their coding capabilities. To enhance accessibility, OpenAI introduced a new product named Codex CLI. Anysphere noted on X that these advanced large language models (LLMs) are now integrated into Cursor.
Cursor’s desktop application has gained a reputation for assisting in coding tasks, drawing from Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet model. Microsoft recently incorporated support for this model into its GitHub Copilot tool, leading to reports from programmers who found Cursor to be more effective than GitHub Copilot.
The landscape of AI development is characterized by substantial investment from leading technology firms in data centers filled with Nvidia graphics processing units designed for running LLMs. These models are increasingly being adopted across various business sectors including sales, customer service, and legal fields.
Significant progress has been made in applying AI to software development, sparking challenges as some tech firms now seek to address the misuse of AI by candidates during job interviews, as outlined in a recent CNBC article.
A pivotal moment in the discourse on AI coding was marked by a February post from OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who introduced the concept of “vibe coding”—leveraging AI for coding tasks. In this context, he acknowledged Cursor and Anthropic’s Sonnet without referencing OpenAI’s models.
Following this shift, many in the tech sector have turned their attention to Cursor and similar platforms such as Bolt, Replit, and Vercel. As of March, Cursor had attracted over one million daily users, according to Bloomberg.
OpenAI has reportedly engaged with more than 20 companies in the AI coding space to explore potential collaborations or acquisitions.
Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor based in San Francisco, was established in 2022 and was reportedly on track to generate over $100 million in recurring revenue by January. Its investors include notable firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, Benchmark, Thrive Capital, and the OpenAI Startup Fund, with Cursor being built on Microsoft’s open-source Visual Studio Code editor.
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