Google Hires A.I. Leaders From a Start-Up That OpenAI Was Courting
The deal, which became public on Friday, was the latest example of how tech companies are waging battles to suck up A.I. talent. The move deepens Google's bench of A.I. engineers while also scoring it a point against OpenAI, one of its biggest challengers in the field.
In May, OpenAI was in talks to acquire Windsurf in a $3 billion deal that would help add thousands of new customers and expand OpenAI's offerings. But the talks broke down in recent weeks because Windsurf's leaders had concerns about the information it might have to share about its product with Microsoft, one of OpenAI's largest investors, two people with knowledge of the deal said.
Under Google's agreement, Varun Mohan, the chief executive of Windsurf, and Douglas Chen, a co-founder, will join Google DeepMind, the company's A.I. division, along with several of Windsurf's research and development employees. Google is also paying for a nonexclusive license for Windsurf technology. It declined to disclose what it was paying.
'We're excited to welcome some top A.I. coding talent from Windsurf's team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,' Google said in a statement. As part of the statement, Mr. Mohan and Mr. Chen said they were excited to join Google.
The Verge and The Information earlier reported on Windsurf's deal.
Silicon Valley giants including Meta have lately poached A.I. talent from rivals and start-ups, sometimes offering compensation packages as high as $100 million. Google has chosen to pay to bring on top A.I. talent from start-ups rather than acquiring the smaller businesses outright. In 2023, Google agreed to pay $3 billion to license technology from Character.AI, a chatbot start-up. The deal allowed Google to hire Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, who both had left Google to start Character.ai.
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