Tag: coding

Google hires top execs, team from Windsurf — upending OpenAIs deal

Google hires top execs and talent from Windsurf
Just as talks with OpenAI ended, Windsurf turned to Google. (Picture: Windsurf)
OpenAI had been negotiating a $3 billion to acquire the agentic coding platform, but Google just snagged their top executives to work in their field for its Gemini platform.

The deal will see Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen and a small team join Google’s DeepMind division.

Also licensing key tech
Further, Google will invest $2.4 billion in a non-exclusive deal to license Windsurf’s technology, reports Reuters, among others.

OpenAI had been in long-winding talks to buy the company, in its biggest deal yet, and many said it was just around the corner, as late as in May, 2025.

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OpenAI’s Codex now available to ChatGPT Plus users

ChatGPT Plus-tier gets access to Codex!
Wider availability for Codex likely means even more pressure on the coding market. (Picture: Chatgpt.com)
Caught this morning, there seems to be a new option in the sidebar at Chatgpt.com for the new Codex coding model — meaning it has expanded access.

Codex is the latest coding agent from OpenAI that runs on a modified o3-model.

Super-coding agent
It can generate several instances of code from your prompts, and even run them in a sandbox to select the best/most efficient version.

OpenAI says it can complete tasks autonomously that would otherwise take hours or days to finish, and they are using it themselves to offload repetitive tasks.

The Plus membership for ChatGPT is $20 a month, and Codex launched as a «research preview» in May for Pro users, who fork out $200 a month.

Update: It appears Codex now also has Internet acccess, which is off by default and comes with a stern warning.

See also: teknotum on the Codex launch, and the announcement thread on X.

Anthropic claims world’s best coding AI with Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet

World's best coding model? According to Anthropic, yes, of course.
Anthopic’s new agentic, thinking and reasoning models are great for coding, and plays Pokemon for 24 hour runs. (Picture: Anthropic)
Opus 4 can sustain almost a full work day of focused coding work, while Sonnet 4 is supposed to be excellent for thinking and reasoning.

Both models produce near-instant responses to queries, but can turn to reasoning and thinking for more demanding requests.

World’s best on coding?
Anthropic claims Opus is «the world’s best coding model,» and it edges out Gemini 2.5 Pro, o3 and GTP 4.1 on SWE-bench Verified, but cannot surpass OpenAI’s o3 on certain PhD-level benchmarks, according to TechCrunch.

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OpenAI debuts Codex, an AI coding agent, further disrupting the software industry

Codex can run your code multiple times until it finds the best version.
Codex can run your code multiple times until til finds the best version. (Picture: OpenAI)
In a world where 30% of Big Tech code is written by AI already, OpenAI says it wants to join the club for «virtual teammates,» and it’s getting ever closer with today’s launch.

OpenAI’s Agents Research Lead, Josh Tobin tells TechCrunch that the company wants software agents to complete tasks autonomously that would otherwise take hours or days to finish, in anything from one to thirty minutes, and OpenAI is already using the model to offload repetitive tasks.

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Big Tech embraces AI coding, hitting 30% of software

Major big tech businesses are doing substantial amounts of AI coding.
Gemini 2.5 Pro opens even more avenues for coding, says Alphabet. They are taking that to heart. (Picture: Google)
With Satya Nadella’s announcement overnight that Microsoft uses AI to code around 30% of their software, AI coding has come of age. Other Big Tech companies have also reported similar numbers lately.

— I’d say maybe 20%, 30% of the code that is inside of our repos today and some of our projects are probably all written by software, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during a conversation at LlamaCon, Meta’s AI developer conference, according to CNBC

Microsoft says they have made progress with Python, and less with C++ projects, but he is still pointing that some projects could be entirely written by AI.

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Anthropic: Virtual employees will arrive next year

Virtual employees are step uup mere agents, say Anthropic.
Virtual employees are a step up mere agents and could be roaming the offces pretty soon. (Picture: Anthropic)

In a recent interview with Axios focusing mostly on security issues, Anthropic said «virtual employees» will be a step up from using mere «agents» on corporate networks.

This will be the next AI innovation, said Jason Clinton, the company’s chief of information security.

Whereas agents can focus on specific, programmable tasks, acts with some autonomy and of course require oversight, a «virtual employee» takes it a step further, with having their own memories and their own corporate accounts and passwords.

This is a major headache for cybersecurity, Clinton further explained, about oversight and hackability of the new employees.

Go read the full story here – at Axios, and check out Anthropics research on agents.