The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday, July 15, edition that Cognition AI, an artificial intelligence start-up offering a coding assistant, announced Monday that it has acquired rival Windsurf amid a competitive tech landscape. A New York Times dispatch to The Globe reports that this follows Alphabet's Google's $2.4-billion (U.S.) deal to acquire Windsurf's top executives and licence its technology, putting Windsurf in a challenging position. Microsoft-backed OpenAI had also been in discussions to buy Windsurf prior to Google's acquisition. Cognition co-founder Scott Wu says: "We've long admired the Windsurf team and what they've built. Within our lifetime, engineers will go from bricklayers to architects, focusing on the creativity of designing systems rather than the manual labour of putting them together." The price of the deal could not immediately be learned. Cognition's move comes amid a flurry of activity by Meta, Google and OpenAI, which are racing against one another to scoop up a small pool of top technology talent in an increasingly competitive space. Big tech companies are now structuring deals as investments rather than outright purchases, unlike their previous acquisition sprees.