Edwin Chen
Founder & CEO @ Surge AI
Founder/CEO of Surge AI, a data-labeling firm powering Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.
“Edwin Chen is the founder and CEO of Surge AI, the company that teaches AI what’s good and bad, powering frontier labs with elite data, environments, and evaluations. Surge surpassed $1 billion in revenue with under 100 employees last year, completely bootstrapped—the fastest company in history to reach this milestone.”
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“Yeah, so we hit over a billion of revenue last year with under 100 people. And I think we're going to see companies with even crazier ratios, like 100 billion per employee in the next few years. AI is...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“One is that people are realizing that you don't have to build giant organizations in order to win.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“And two, yeah, all these efficiencies from AI. And they're just going to lead to a really amazing time in company building.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“And instead of products optimized for revenue and what VCs want to see, you'll get more interesting ones built by these tiny obsessed teams. So people building things they actually care about, real te...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“We essentially teach AI models what's good and what's bad. So we train them using human data, and there's a lot of different products that we have, like SFT, RHF, rubrics, verifiers, RL environments, ...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“I think most people don't understand what quality even means in this space. They think you could just throw bodies at a problem and get good data and that's completely wrong. Let me give you an exampl...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“And it's really hard, and so to build all this technology to measure it, but I think that's exactly what we want AI to do, and so we have these really deep notions about quality that we're always tryi...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“And then other questions like, okay, are you carrying [inaudible 00:14:49] how much synthetic data are we throwing into the mix? How much do you care about these 20 different benchmarks?"”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“Other companies are going to be principled and be like, "Okay, yeah, no, I don't care about marketing. I just care about how my model performs on these real world tasks at the end of the day, and so I...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“And it's almost like there's a trade-off between all of these different things, and there's like a...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“One of the things I often think about is that there's a... It's almost like there's an art to post training. It's not purely a science. When you are deciding what kind of model you're trying to create...”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
“Yep, exactly. Again, going back to the example I said earlier, certain companies, if you ask them what is good poem, they will simply robotically check off all of these instructions on our list.”
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)