Latest news with #AnshulRamachandran
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Building Blocks Of Agentic Systems: What Does It Look Like?
We know that AI agents are going to be redefining business at nearly every level, in every vertical end in every field. But what supports this technology? Why are we now seeing agentic AI explode? There are a number of fundamental ideas getting used by companies and other stakeholders right now. One is that idea that AI can specialize into doing various tasks or operations. We see this with Claude, and agents that can use a computer like humans do. There's also the idea of distillation of systems and ensemble learning, where models interact with each other. And then there's the data side, where companies have to decide how do they deploy systems and where do they keep the data, as well as how they aggregate it for use. At Imagination in Action in April, my colleague Daniela Rus, director of the MIT CSAIL lab, interviewed a number of professionals on their thoughts. Cindy Howson from Thoughtspot, Kevin Shatzkamer of Google Cloud, formerly of Microsoft, and Anshul Ramachandran from Windsurf participated. In terms of big potential, Howson said the underpinnings were already there, and mentioned the 'Internet of AI' as a new paradigm. Shatzkamer talked about productive AI And its capabilities, while noting that although a lot of the technology is here, it's 'not stitched together yet.' Ramachandran talked about generative models getting good at specialization, and the proliferation of agentic systems. 'Even as we are hitting some physical limitations in the real world,' he said, 'it's going to unlock different frontiers of models, power, technology in general, that will enable a new kind of frontier of applications and ways of thinking about things.' In terms of current business limitations, Howson said something about getting clean, consistent data, and talked about moving from the structured data to semi-structured data, such as data assets housed in PDFs. 'I think many companies have clean, consistent structured data,' she said. 'When we talk about semi-structured data, think about the PDFs on your network drives -which employee manual is the right version? It's anyone's guess. … I think some of the data management disciplines that we have applied to structured data, we have not applied to semi-structured, but I think the technology is ready, it is more the people, the mindsets and the processes that are less ready.' She also pointed out that 81% of people fail at basic literacy. The panel also discussed how systems are getting smarter. Ramachandran talked about multiset retrieval, and how the systems can do search the way humans do, with one search after another, to compound accuracy and promote vibrant results. Shatzkamer talked about long memory and contest windows, and research reasoning capabilities. He also mentioned the future value of quantum, and of supervised fine-tuning. 'Look where quantum computing is on the near horizon,' he said. 'I think that's going to be a game changer in terms of AI processing capabilities, right? I think right now we're in a world of more, bigger, faster, and we keep on trying to build as much infrastructure as possible to support the demand. And I think we'll see that trend continue for the foreseeable future.' As for the supervised fine-tuning, he had this to say: 'As much as we've talked about supervised learning … in the ML world, (in) this new supervised fine-tuning world, (you) can build smaller models with human in the loop in a much more meaningful way.' Ramachandran suggested that generative AI is hitting critical mass, with interesting data that doesn't necessarily need huge LLMs. He gave examples of user behavior stats that can unlock a lot of actionable moves for nearly any kind of business, pointing out that you don't need a massive data center or a lot of Nvidia GPUs to do these kinds of research. Shatzkamer opined that the OS community did a good job in fostering all of this to maturity. Howson talked about the cloud getting decentralized and the 'hybrid world' that will result. When Rus asked about the single most interesting emerging tech, the panelists had these responses. Howson brought up agentic analytics. Shatzkamer talked about operational metrics for efficiency. Ramachandran said he's most interested in robotics and physical AI. All of this has big ramifications for our new AI world. Stay with me as we see a lot of this continuing to evolve as the year moves on.
Business Wire
15-05-2025
- Business
- Business Wire
Windsurf Launches SWE-1: A Frontier AI Model Family Built for the Full Software Engineering Lifecycle
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Windsurf, the company transforming how software is built, today announced the launch of SWE-1, its first family of proprietary AI models designed to accelerate the entire software engineering process, not just code generation. The SWE-1 family includes three models optimized for different workflows and user tiers, and marks Windsurf's entry into frontier model development with performance competitive to foundational models for software-relevant tasks. 'Writing code is only a fraction of what engineers do,' said Varun Mohan, CEO and co-founder of Windsurf. 'To truly accelerate software development by 99%, we had to move beyond 'coding-capable' models and build software engineering-native models. SWE-1 is our first step in that direction, building a foundation for the future state.' Meet the SWE-1 Family: SWE-1: Windsurf's full-size model, built for advanced reasoning and tool use. Available for unlimited use to all paid users. SWE-1-lite: A smaller but powerful model that replaces Cascade Base, now available for unlimited use to all users, free and paid. SWE-1-mini: A lightweight model powering Windsurf Tab, designed for fast, passive code prediction, now unlimited to all free and paid users. Powered by Flow Awareness SWE-1 was made possible through Windsurf's core design principle: flow awareness, the ability for humans and AI to operate on a shared timeline. This deep integration between the Windsurf Editor and its models allows seamless, context-aware collaboration and sets the foundation for continuously improving model performance at scale. 'Flow awareness lets us see exactly where models succeed or fail, down to the individual decision point. That feedback loop is our competitive edge,' said Anshul Ramachandran, Founding Team. With a continuous stream of user feedback, Windsurf has been steadily building the richest representation of a shared timeline for software engineering work. SWE-1 is the initial proof of concept for understanding a true end-to-end timeline. What's next While SWE-1 represents Windsurf's first venture into frontier model development, it won't be the last, and it is a testament to what can be achieved with a small engineering team and a limited scope of compute. The company plans to invest aggressively in SWE models and intends on rapidly expanding its machine learning research team going forward. Developers can begin using the SWE-1 model family with the Windsurf Editor by visiting today. About Windsurf: Windsurf is a generative AI-powered software development platform helping engineers move faster, reduce technical debt, and build with greater confidence. With code-native models and flow-aware tools, Windsurf integrates seamlessly into existing workflows to enable higher-quality engineering at scale.
Forbes
06-05-2025
- Forbes
It's OpenAI's Biggest Acquisition To Date – But What Does Windsurf Do?
The Open AI logo NurPhoto via Getty Images OpenAI's acquisition of Windsurf is making big headlines in the tech media world. It's the biggest such activity by the household-name model company responsible for ChatGPT, and it has big ramifications for AI development in general. It's a $3 billion deal, too. However, a lot of the reporting stops at a very surface level. If you're trying to figure out what Windsurf is all about, you might or might not get what you want from the syndicated content that shows up at the top of the Google SERP feed. So let's break down two elements of what Windsurf does. As an alternative, you can also click through to this video where I interviewed Windsurf-nee-Coedium co-founder Anshul Ramachandran about everything, including how they decided to change their name. Here's one of Ramachandran's thoughts on the AI revolution, for context: 'The only thing that has ever invariably happened is (that) we've had more developers every single time the nature of what a developer is has changed.' As for the company's major contributions to AI, read on. Vibe Coding and Windsurf First of all, most of those reporting on Windsurf describe it as a company that has its own coding tool. Windsurf Editor is a standalone IDE incorporating AI agents to help with automation of coding. It's an AI-native design that leverages the new capabilities of LLMs to let humans, in a sense, take a backseat. Not too many months ago, prominent tech person Andrej Karpathy talked about the practice of vibe coding, where you just give the machine some orders, and sit back and let AI manage the details. 'It's not really coding,' he famously said, 'I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy-paste stuff, and it mostly works.' In other words, you don't have to hand-code anymore – you just catch the vibe of what the machine is doing. I've written a number of articles about this where we talk about whether or not you need actual coding experience to do this kind of vibe coding, or whether it helps. In any case, Windsurf Editor, as well as a cascade AI agent inside it, helps with the bugging, refracturing and other code operations, as an alternative to something like Cursor, which is also another popular option for vibe coding. For its part, Windsurf Editor is very popular in some quarters, as in this notable quote from Y Combinator's Garry Tan: 'Every single one of these engineers has to spend literally just one day making projects with Windsurf and it will be like they strapped on rocket boosters.' That's a pretty glowing endorsement. The Hardware Picture Now, if you click into some of the major reporting on the OpenAI-Windsurf deal, you're not going to hear anything about strategic hardware investment. As mentioned, quite a few of these articles just say that Windsurf offers the vibe coding tool, and leave it at that. However, others are suggesting the OpenAI is interested in Windsurf partly for its hardware approach, where the company is also focused, according to some sources, on 'custom AI chips and high performance server clusters.' (see this short.) How does this work? Well, if you look at internal documentation, it turns out that the server approach used by windsurf is built for something called MCP or model context protocol. The tools send activity to the appropriate servers as part of the overall workflow. As for the chips, you can catch the rest of that interview or hear about how Windsurf and its new stakeholder are going to pursue microprocessor development. My point is that Windsurf does both of these things – it offers vibe coding tools, and it builds hardware context for those systems. Is OpenAI a Non-Profit? In correlative articles in contemporary news, we see that OpenAI Sam Altman is noting the company will maintain both for-profit and non-profit status. 'Our for-profit LLC, which has been under the non-profit (status) since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)–a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission.' OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said recently, according to reporting. 'Instead of our current complex capped-profit structure—which made sense when it looked like there might be one dominant AGI effort but doesn't in a world of many great AGI companies—we are moving to a normal capital structure where everyone has stock. This is not a sale, but a change of structure to something simpler.' When this plan was initially announced, there was some confusion over whether the company would become non-profit or not. This seems to suggest that both components will be maintained going into the future, and that a non-profit arm of the company will have a substantial impact. As for OpenAI and Windsurf, this is big news. We want to see how this partnership works, and what it does for one of the biggest AI environments on the market.
