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

Useful AI training data requires deciding what quality means for the task. Edwin Chen, founder of training-data company Surge AI, illustrates this with poetry: a response can meet requirements about length and subject while still lacking originality or emotional effect. Chen says the company combines contributor expertise, reviews, and observed performance to match people to tasks and assess their output, including testing whether the data improves models. Chen's account makes the quality standard itself part of the training work: what evaluators reward helps determine what the model learns to produce.

“We're basically teaching our models to chase dopamine instead of truth.”

Edwin Chen

“it's kind of crazy that these models can win IMO gold medals, but they still have trouble parsing PDFs.”

Edwin Chen

“It's literally optimizing your models for the types of people who buy tablets at the grocery store.”

Edwin Chen

“I would rather be Terrence Tao than Warren Buffett”

Edwin Chen

“You can actually build a successful company by simply building something so good that it cuts through all that noise.”

Edwin Chen