Vibe-coding startup Windsurf launches in-house AI models

On Thursday, Windsurf, a startup that develops popular AI tools for software engineers, announced the launch of its first family of AI software engineering models, or SWE-1 for short. The startup says it trained its new family of AI models — SWE-1, SWE-1-lite, and SWE-1-mini — to be optimized for the “entire software engineering process,” not just coding. The launch of Windsurf’s in-house AI models may come as a shock to some, given that OpenAI has reportedly closed a $3 billion deal to acquire Windsurf. However, this model launch suggests Windsurf is trying to expand beyond just developing applications to also developing the models that power them. According to Windsurf, SWE-1, the largest and most capable AI model of the bunch, performs competitively with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4.1, and Gemini 2.5 Pro on internal programming benchmarks. However, SWE-1 appears to fall short of frontier AI models, such as Claude 3.7 Sonnet, on software engineering tasks. Windsurf says its SWE-1-lite ... Read full article.