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Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/fi
by theahura 6mo ago
Lots of people in the comments talking about how this is about training data, but surely this is actually about hiring competent people after the mass exodus/firing at xAI?
- jeffgreco 6mo ago60b?
- mirekrusin 6mo ago10b active it seems
- raw_anon_1111 6mo agoAre cursor developers “competent” in creating frontier models? Aren’t they just using other company’s models?
- theahura 6mo agoTraining any large model at scale is hard, and Cursor has trained several including agentic ones. https://cursor.com/blog/composer https://cursor.com/blog/composer
- YmiYugy 6mo agoI think composer has currently by far the best price to performance ratio for coding (not counting subsidized subscription cost by OpenAI and Anthropic). It's based on Kimi K2, but I think it's fair to say, that their RL really sets it apart from the other open weight models.
- bensyverson 6mo agoThat's quite a pricey acquihire
- airstrike 6mo agoWhoever thinks the talent pool is this limited that it requires offering Cursor of all places $60B is pattern-matching so hard they might as well be a quilt.
- theahura 6mo agohi, im the quilt. Note that Meta paid ~16b for Alexandr Wang, and Google paid ~3b for the windsurf executive team. You are making a category error -- the talent pool isn't "ML researcher" it's "competent leader"
- conartist6 6mo agoIt's not about the talent pool at all. The AI bubble music stops when one of these former-darling companies has a complete crashout rather than a "successful exit". The investors keep investing because even largely-failed products get acquihire paydays
- noelsusman 6mo ago$60 billion worth of competent people?
- Aurornis 6mo agoThey could offer $20 million dollar signing bonuses to every Cursor employee if they wanted to hire them away and it would be much cheaper. They’re buying the customers and the brand.
- YmiYugy 6mo agoBuying the customers seems though, when it looks like they migrate to whomever offers the steepest subsidies.
- kennywinker 6mo agoA brand he’ll promptly burn to the ground by renaming it some garbage with an X in it.
- Xiaoher-C 6mo agoThe acquihire angle is probably part of it, but I'd note that Cursor's team is small — around 50 people — and the $60B valuation makes it expensive per head even by AI acquihire standards. You don't pay that multiple for talent alone. What you might pay for is market signal + model distribution. Grok needs a story for why enterprises should switch. "The model that powers the tool you already use every day" is a much easier enterprise sales pitch than "our LLM benchmarks slightly better." The $60B is at least partially buying the answer to the question: why should any company bet on xAI?