When OpenAI bought Windsurf a lot of the discussion was about which market and which customers they hope to get access to by that acquisition. This deal gives xAI privileged distribution among nearly a billion of users (and potentially future customers) for a magnitude less of money.

Who will „win“ the LLM-AI race is as much undecided as is the common way to interact with them and this seems like quite a sensible bet on distribution for a huge userbase with a very specific integration into a platform. Doesn’t seem at all crazy to me.