4 ms·
What are they buying?
by suddenlybananas 7mo ago
What are they buying?
- KeplerBoy 7mo agomindshare and a central piece of the python package management ecosystem.
- bootsmann 7mo agoMost popular product on the planet acquires a random python packaging org for mindshare? What am I not seeing here?
- __float 7mo ago"uv" is a very widely used tool in the Python ecosystem, and Python is important to AI. Calling it "a random Python packaging org" seems a bit unfair.
- nilkn 7mo agoI feel like it's pretty easy to predict what OpenAI is trying to do. They want their codex agent integrated directly into the most popular, foundational tooling for one of the world's most used and most influential programming languages. And, vice versa, they probably want to be able to ensure that tooling remains well-maintained so it stays on top and continues to integrate well with their agent. They want codex to become the "default" coding agent by making it the one integrated into popular open source software.
- MoreQARespect 7mo agoThis makes much more sense as an zoom-buys-keybase style acquihire. I bet within a month the astral devs will be on new projects. Bundling codex with uv isnt going to meaningfully affect the number of people using it. It doesnt increase the switching costs or anything.
- aldanor 7mo agoOne of the popular products on the planet acquires the most popular python packaging org
- KeplerBoy 7mo agoThe dev market? Anthropic's services are arguably more popular among a certain developer demographic. I guess this move might end up in a situation where the uv team comes up with some new agent-first tooling, which works best or only with OAI services.
- mcmcmc 7mo agoThis just seems like panic M&A. They know they aren’t on track to ever meet their obligations to investors but they can’t actually find a way to move towards profitability. Hence going back to the VC well of gambling obscene amounts of money hoping for a 10x return… somehow
- OJFord 7mo agoWhat you're not seeing, edited inline, is: Not-most popular LLM software development product on the planet acquires most popular/rapidly rising python packaging org for mindshare.
- Ygg2 7mo agoI didn't know Claude bought Astral! /S
- everforward 7mo agoI think this is more about `ruff` than `uv`. Linting is all about parsing the code into something machines can analyze, which to me feels like something that could potentially be useful for AI in a similar way to JetBrains writing their own language parsers to make "find and replace" work sanely and what not. I'm sort of wondering if they're going to try to make a coding LLM that operates on an AST rather than text, and need software/expertise to manage the text->AST->text pipeline in a way that preserves the structure of your files/text.
- skydhash 7mo agoWriting a parser is not that much of work to buy a company in order to do it. Piggybacking on LSP servers and treesitter would be more efficient.
- everforward 7mo agoWriting a literal parser isn’t too hard (and there’s presumably an existing one in the source code for the language). Writing something that understands all the methods that come in a Django model goes way beyond parsing the code, and is a genuine struggle in language where you can’t execute the code without worrying about side effects like Python. Ty should give them a base for that where the model is able to see things that aren’t literally in the code and aren’t in the training data (eg an internal version of something like SQLAlchemy).
- skydhash 7mo agoIf you’re talking about magic methods/properties enabled by reflection and macros, then you’re no longer statically analyzing the code.
- everforward 7mo agoStatic analysis just requires that you don't actually execute the code. It's possible (sometimes) to infer what methods/properties would be create without actually statically analyzing the code. E.g. mypy has a plugin to read the methods and return types of SQLAlchemy records, I believe without actually executing them. Obviously not globally true, but in limited domains/scenarios you can see what would exist without actually executing the code.
- contagiousflow 7mo agoWhy can't they just vibe code a uv replacement?
- KeplerBoy 7mo agoThey can, everyone can. Good luck vibe coding marketshare for your new tool.
- suddenlybananas 7mo agoWhy would that marketshare be valuable?
- drgiggles 7mo agoThis. It's valuable b/c if you have many thousands of python devs using astral tooling all day, and it tightly integrates with subscription based openai products...likelihood of openai product usage increases. Same idea with the anthropic bun deal. Remains to be seen what those integrations are and if it translates to more subs, but that's the current thesis. Buy user base -> cram our ai tool into the workflow of that user base.
- freetonik 7mo agoOpenAI could vibe-code marketshare by introducing bias into ChatGPT's responses and recommendations. "– how to do x in Python? – Start by installing OpenAI-UV first..."
- cesarvarela 7mo agoBut new tools (like uv) start with no market share.
- noodletheworld 7mo agouv
- rvnx 7mo ago> Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B They are buying out investors, it's like musical chairs. The liquidity is going to be better on OpenAI, so it pleases everyone (less pressure from investors, more liquidity for investors). The acquisition is just a collateral effect.
- jon-wood 7mo agoI can see why the former investors and Astral founders would like that, what I don't see is what OpenAI get out of the deal.
- rvnx 7mo agoMaybe OpenAI literally considers themselves as the ultimate non-profit company. Hmm…
- tgtweak 7mo agoAre you implying that the revenue multiple on this acquisition is lower than openAIs and that they'd be making money by acquiring and folding into their valuation multiple? I think that's not the case and I would wager non existent. This was an acquihire (the author of ripgrep, rg, which codex uses nearly exclusively for file operations, is part of the team at Astral). So, 99% acquihire , 1% other financial trickery. I don't even know if Astral has any revenue or sells anything, candidly.
- rvnx 7mo agoThey raised 4M USD, they have 26 full-time employees (they pay 120<->200K / yr, cf https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/523411-93 https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/523411-93 ). It means the company almost reached their runway, so all these employees would have to find a job. It's a very very good product, but it is open-source and Apache / MIT, so difficult to defend from anyone just clicking on fork. Especially a large company like OpenAI who has massive distribution. Now that they hired the employees, they have no more guarantees than if they made a direct offer to them.
- huqedato 7mo agoIMO, they are buying business just to put them down later to avoid potential competition. The recipe is not new, it has been practiced by Google/Microsoft for many years.
- ainch 7mo agoWhat competition was OpenAI likely to face from a team working on fast Python tooling?
- huqedato 7mo agoI have no idea but for sure they did their homework before making this step. I suppose they're grabbing these business just to stay ahead, in order to prevent the competitors to buy those instead.
- butlike 7mo agoSitting on cash as a company also looks bad to investors
- cozzyd 7mo ago$ uv install claude-agent-sdk I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]