Google Just Hired a Vibe Coder Whisperer

The battle for AI talent is starting to feel a little like Game of Thrones. Everyone’s all smiles until someone gets poached. This week, Google made its move.

They just brought on Varun Mohan, the CEO of Windsurf, in a $2.4 billion licensing deal. Not a full-on acquisition. Just a casual multi-billion-dollar arrangement for talent and tech. And yes, this happened after OpenAI’s attempt to buy them fell through. Awkward.

About Windsurf

So what’s Windsurf? Think of it as an AI sidekick for developers. While you’re coding, it’s quietly rewriting your stuff ten steps ahead. Helpful? Wildly. Especially as “vibe coding” (don’t ask) becomes the new hotness.

Basically, it lets devs look like wizards and makes people who don’t code (hi) feel like they’re being left behind. The tool doesn’t just autocomplete code. It reads your intent, understands your project, and then builds out fully functional pieces like it knows where you’re going before you do. It even keeps track of your preferences, past prompts, and how your code performs—all while asking for your permission before making changes like a well-behaved AI butler. Oh, and if something breaks? It just fixes it. Automatically.

Behind the scenes, the numbers are wild. Windsurf jumped from around $10 million to over $100 million in annual recurring revenue in just a few months. It’s used by hundreds of thousands of devs daily, has run over 150 billion tokens through its system, and Fortune 100 companies are already hooked.

Their customer retention rate? A near-unheard-of 100 percent. It’s not just fast-growing. It’s sticky. And with enterprise clients like JPMorgan and Dell trusting it to touch their legacy code, Windsurf isn’t just riding the AI wave. It’s helping write the tide chart.

Why it matters

I’ve been saying it for a while now. The AI wars are not just heating up. They are boiling. Talent is getting scooped up fast, deals are happening left and right, and the companies that win this race are going to rewrite the internet and make a ridiculous amount of money doing it. Everyone sees the gold rush and they are willing to invest big, cut corners, throw elbows, and code in a cave if it means getting ahead.

Now for this deal. As someone who has played around with vibe coding, I will say it. ChatGPT is not great at it. Windsurf could have helped fill that gap. But OpenAI blinked when it came time to pull the trigger. Google didn’t.

Windsurf will probably do great things at Google. But to me, this feels less like a huge win for Google and more like a big miss for OpenAI.

Rapid Fire

🇨🇳 After becoming the first company to hit a four trillion dollar valuation, NVIDIA’s CEO Jensen Huang is celebrating the only way tech billionaires seem to know how. He’s hopping on a plane to China to explore some business opportunities. The company already has factories there, so the trip is not completely out of left field. Still, the timing and destination are raising some eyebrows in Washington. The exact details of the visit are unclear, and that lack of transparency is not helping anyone sleep better at night.

In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement, Senator Jim Banks and Senator Elizabeth Warren sent Huang a letter urging him to steer clear of companies linked to Chinese intelligence or dodging US export laws. This is a classic case of more money, more problems. When you are the poster child for American AI power, the scrutiny comes with the job. NVIDIA may be riding high right now, but every move it makes is going to come with a side of geopolitical tension.

🚀 Firefly Aerospace just filed to go public. The Texas-based company builds rockets, space tugs, and even a lunar lander that actually touched down on the moon earlier this year. Not bad for a private company. This move comes after a pretty quiet couple of years in IPO land, where most companies were too spooked by market conditions to make the leap.

Now, the rocket market is finally starting to take off. Yes, pun intended. Rocket Lab has already proven there’s room for more than just SpaceX, and Firefly clearly thinks it can carve out its own spot in the cosmos. If this IPO goes well, expect more launches, more innovation, and maybe a little more competition in a sector that’s starting to look less like sci-fi and more like the next economic frontier.

🖥️ OpenAI has once again delayed the release of its highly anticipated open source model, citing the need to do more safety tests before releasing it to the masses. CEO Sam Altman says it is about reviewing high risk areas, but the timing is not great. Moonshot AI just released a model that is reportedly beating GPT 4.1 on benchmarks, and the pressure is on. Still, OpenAI is choosing caution over speed, and in a world where AI tools can be misused in a hundred different ways before lunch, it is probably the smart call. Even if it makes them look like they are stuck in neutral.

Not everyone is happy about it. Some developers are annoyed. Some investors are twitchy. And the longer OpenAI waits, the more momentum it risks handing over to fast moving rivals like Moonshot, xAI, and DeepMind. But this is a calculated move. OpenAI is betting that people will eventually care more about a safe and stable release than a rushed one that backfires. Whether that is thoughtful leadership or just PR spin is up for debate. Either way, it is a reminder that putting powerful AI into the public’s hands is no longer just about engineering. It is about responsibility.

Polling Zone

Tech Radar

If you have not been off grid on a remote campaign trip this week, then chances are your eyeballs have been drowning in Prime Day ads or whatever off brand versions Walmart and Target are pushing.

The last few days have been a full on assault on our wallets, our self control, and our sense of what we actually need. Like, do you really need another pair of headphones just because they are 25 percent off?

Amazon, Target, and Walmart are not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts. They are chasing a piece of the 24 billion dollars that just got spent over the last few days. And they are using some of the most advanced recommendation systems in the world to make sure you do not leave empty handed.

These platforms track what you browse, what you click, what you hesitate on, and what people just like you bought at 2 a.m. last night. Then they feed all that data into models designed to guess exactly what might get you to pull the trigger. This is not just retail. It is machine learning dressed up as friendly shopping suggestions, nudging your brain chemistry and quietly pushing you toward checkout. And the scary part is, it works really well.

Recently Deployed

Google just leveled up its Veo 3 video model by letting users generate videos from images, but only if you are in the right country and willing to pay. The new feature lives on the Gemini website, not the mobile app, and lets users upload an image and pair it with a prompt. Want to turn a photo of a cardboard box into a hamster cooking show? Sure, why not. Just type it in and let the AI do the rest.

The catch is, this is only available to Pro and Ultra subscribers, and Ultra is currently locked to the United States with a two hundred dollar price tag.

The videos come stamped with watermarks so no one mistakes them for real footage. One is visible, and the other is hidden using Google’s SynthID tech, which cannot be removed or edited out. It is all part of Google's effort to stay ahead in the AI race without causing chaos in the process.

While it is unclear when other countries will get access, the feature shows how quickly generative video is evolving and just how weird and specific your creative ideas can get once AI starts turning images into motion.

That’s a wrap. 

If your brain feels like it just got hit with a firehose of AI, rockets, billionaires, shopping algorithms, and vibe coding — good. That means it’s working.

We’ll be back Tuesday with more news you can actually use and fewer buzzwords to suffer through. Until then, maybe take a break from the algorithm and go outside. Or don’t. I am not your therapist.

Catch you soon.