On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops well-liked 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 educated 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 increase past simply creating purposes to additionally creating the fashions that energy them.
In response 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, corresponding to Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on software program engineering duties.
Windsurf says its SWE-1-lite and SWE-1-mini fashions will probably be accessible for all customers on its platform, free or paid. In the meantime, SWE-1 will solely be accessible 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 recognized for instruments that enable software program engineers to write down and edit code via conversations with an AI chatbot, a apply often called “vibe coding.” Different well-liked vibe-coding startups embrace Cursor, the biggest 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 purposes.
In a video saying the SWE fashions, feedback made by Windsurf’s Head of Analysis, Nicholas Moy, underscore Windsurf’s latest efforts to distinguish its strategy. “Immediately’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 submit that whereas different fashions are good at writing code, they wrestle to work between a number of surfaces — as programmers typically do — corresponding to terminals, IDEs, and the web. The startup says SWE-1 was educated 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.
