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Edwin Chen

Edwin Chen

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About Edwin Chen

Edwin Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data company that provides training data to every frontier AI lab. The company reached $1B+ revenue in under 4 years with ~70 employees, entirely bootstrapped and profitable from day one.

Career Highlights

  • Surge AI (2020-present): Co-founder and CEO
  • $1B+ revenue: Under 4 years, ~70 employees
  • Bootstrapped: No VC funding, profitable from day one
  • Clients: Every frontier AI lab uses Surge for training data
  • Quora/Twitter: Former ML engineer

Notable Positions

On Why Claude is Better

Taste in data, not volume:

"Why is Claude better at coding and writing? It's not more data - it's taste in what data to collect. Are you optimizing for front-end vs backend? Visual design vs efficiency? Chasing PR benchmarks or real-world performance? There's an art to post-training that requires sophisticated judgment."

On Benchmark Problems

A brutal critique of LM Arena:

"LM Arena benchmarks are literally optimizing your models for the type of people who buy tabloids at supermarkets. Users glance for 2 seconds and pick whatever looks 'flashiest' - more emojis, more bold text, longer responses. Models can hallucinate everything but still win if they look impressive."

On The Deeper Problem

"We're teaching AI to chase dopamine instead of truth. The same engagement optimization that broke social media is now being applied to AI training. Labs know it's bad but optimize for it anyway because sales teams need PR."

On Quality vs Checkboxes

"Good data isn't checkboxes - it's 'Nobel-prize level poetry' vs 'high school level that follows instructions.' Some labs mechanically check instruction boxes; others understand the implicit, subtle qualities that make outputs actually good."

Key Quotes

  • "Taste in data, not volume."
  • "Optimizing for tabloid buyers."
  • "Teaching AI to chase dopamine."