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

You guys hit a billion in revenue in less than four years with around 60 to 70 people. You're completely bootstrapped, haven't raised any VC money. I don't believe anyone has ever done this before. We basically never wanted to play the Silicon Valley game. I always thought it was ridiculous. I used to work at a bunch of depictach companies, and I always felt that we could fire 90% of people and we would move faster. Because the best people would have all these distractions. So when we started Surge, we wanted to build it completely differently with a super small, super elite team. You guys are by far the most successful data company out there. We essentially teach AI models what's good and what's bad. 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. That's completely wrong. To a regular person, it doesn't feel like these models are getting that much smarter constantly. Over the past year, I've realized that the values that the companies have will shape the model. I was asking Claude to help me drop an email the other day, and after thirty minutes, yeah, I think it really crafted me to perfect email when I sent it. But then I realized I spent thirty minutes doing something that didn't matter at all. If you You could choose the perfect model behavior, which model would you want? Do you want a model that says, you're absolutely right, there are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email and it continues for 50 more iterations. Or do you want a model that's optimizing for your time and productivity and just says no. You need to stop. Your email's great. Just send it and move on. You have this hot take that a lot of these labs are pushing AGI in the wrong direction. I'm worried that instead of building AI that will actually advance us as a species, curing cancer, solving poverty, understanding the universe, we are optimizing for AI stop instead. Could be optimizing your models for the types of people who buy tabloids at a grocery store, where basically teach our models to

Chase dopamine is that a truth. Today my guest is Edwin Chen, founder and CEO of Surge AI. Edwin is an extraordinary CO and Surge is an extraordinary company. They're the leading AI data company. Powering training at every frontier AI lab.

They are also the fastest company to ever hit one billion dollars in revenue. In just four years after launch, With fewer than one hundred people. And also completely bootstrapped. They've never raised a dollar in VC money, they've also been profitable from day one.

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