On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops fashionable AI instruments for software program engineers, introduced the launch of its first household of AI software program engineering fashions, or SWE-1 for brief. The startup says it skilled its new household of AI fashions — SWE-1, SWE-1-lite, and SWE-1-mini — to be optimized for the “total software program engineering course of,” not simply coding.
The launch of Windsurf’s in-house AI fashions might come as a shock to some, on condition that OpenAI has reportedly closed a $3 billion deal to accumulate Windsurf. Nevertheless, this mannequin launch suggests Windsurf is attempting to develop past simply growing functions to additionally growing the fashions that energy them.
In keeping with Windsurf, SWE-1, the most important 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 in need of frontier AI fashions, equivalent to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on software program engineering duties.
Windsurf says its SWE-1-lite and SWE-1-mini fashions shall 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 finest identified for instruments that enable software program engineers to jot down and edit code by conversations with an AI chatbot, a apply generally known as “vibe coding.” Different fashionable vibe-coding startups embrace Cursor, the most important within the area, 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. “In the present day’s frontier fashions are optimized for coding, and so they’ve made large strides during the last couple of years,” says Moy. “However they’re not sufficient for us … Coding is just not software program engineering.”
Windsurf notes in a weblog publish that whereas different fashions are good at writing code, they battle to work between a number of surfaces — as programmers usually do — equivalent to terminals, IDEs, and the web. The startup says SWE-1 was skilled utilizing a brand new knowledge 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 could launch extra AI fashions sooner or later.
