Dec 07, 2025

The 100-person lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)

Edwin Chen, founder and CEO of Surge AI, discusses his contrarian approach to building a bootstrapped, billion-dollar company, the critical role of high-quality data and 'taste' in training AI, the flaws in current benchmarks, and why reinforcement learning environments are the next frontier for creating models that truly advance humanity.

Sep 16, 2025

The Startup Powering The Data Behind AGI

Edwin Chen, founder and CEO of Surge AI, shares the company's origin story, its rapid, bootstrapped growth, and its research-driven philosophy on data. He critiques traditional data labeling, explains why metrics like inter-annotator agreement fail for complex tasks, and offers a sharp analysis of benchmark hacking. Chen also details the future of data, from multimodal and agentic reasoning in rich RL environments to the need for hyper-specialized expertise for scientific discovery.