00:00Today on Forbes, the AI billionaire you've never heard of.
00:05After a morning spent reviewing a data set, reading research papers,
00:09and playing with cutting-edge AI models in his Manhattan apartment,
00:13Edwin Chen takes a short walk to the swank three-story Starbucks Reserve Roastery on 9th Avenue.
00:19Dressed in a Vori navy t-shirt with a tiger-adorned canvas tote slung over one shoulder,
00:25Chen heads downstairs and settles in at a dark corner table.
00:29Sipping a small green tea, he says, quote,
00:31because ordering coffee here takes too long,
00:34the founder and CEO of Surge AI, a data labeling and AI training firm,
00:39then launches into a non-stop two-hour discussion about everything from Silicon Valley culture,
00:45he hates it, to his rivals, quote,
00:47they're all body shops, to how humans might interface with aliens if they came to Earth.
00:53He says, quote,
00:54They don't speak English, so how would you communicate with them?
00:57How would you decipher their language?
00:59Hopefully, there'll be some mathematical way to do it.
01:02This dilemma is also explored in his favorite short story,
01:05a 1998 piece by science fiction author Ted Chiang.
01:09The short story, called Story of Your Life,
01:12became the basis for the movie Arrival,
01:15in which a linguist tries to talk to aliens by identifying patterns in their speech and writing.
01:19It was also part of Chen's inspiration for starting Surge in 2020, he says,
01:25adding that he wants his data labeling company to encode the, quote,
01:28richness of humanity.
01:31For him, that means getting the smartest humans,
01:33including professors from Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard,
01:36to train AI,
01:38translating their specialized knowledge to the ones and zeros underpinning large language models.
01:43In addition to the Ivy League brainiacs, Chen employs an army of a million-plus gig workers
01:49from more than 50 countries around the world
01:51who help come up with questions that might stump AI,
01:55evaluating the model's responses and writing criteria that help AI generate a perfect response.
02:01Using the term AGI, short for Artificial General Intelligence,
02:05which is tech lingo for when AI will match or surpass human capabilities,
02:10Chen says, quote,
02:12I really do think that what we're doing is so critical to all the AI models
02:15that without us, AGI just won't happen, and I want it to happen.
02:21Long-winded, brilliant, and eccentric,
02:24Chen is perhaps the most successful tech entrepreneur you've never heard of.
02:28That's because until very recently, he wanted it that way,
02:32despite being well-known in the AI community.
02:34The data scientist who did stints at Twitter, Google, and Facebook
02:38eschewed traditional venture capital
02:40and left the Bay Area fishbowl seven years ago,
02:43electing to fund Surge himself,
02:46starting with, quote,
02:47a couple million from savings from his decade in big tech.
02:51Chen, who describes the typical VC-backed Valley startup as a, quote,
02:55get-rich-quick scheme, says, quote,
02:58one of the reasons why we bootstrapped
03:00is that I've always hated the Silicon Valley status game.
03:02He also hates the idea of raising so much money and then needing to spend it.
03:08In his opinion, that leads to massive overhiring.
03:11He points out that Surge has just 250 employees,
03:15including full-time, part-time, and consultants.
03:18By contrast, Scale AI, its big rival,
03:21has four times as many staffers with less revenue.
03:24Surge, which helps tech companies get the high-quality data
03:28they need to improve their AI models,
03:31brought in $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024,
03:35less than five years after its founding,
03:37from customers including Google,
03:39Meta, Microsoft,
03:41and AI Labs Anthropic and Mistral.
03:43It helped train Google's Gemini and Anthropic's clod.
03:47It's been profitable from nearly day one, according to Chen.
03:51Based on those numbers,
03:53the company is worth an estimated $24 billion.
03:56Surge is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation,
04:01though the round hasn't closed yet.
04:03Chen's decision to fund Surge himself has paid off handsomely.
04:07His approximately 75% stake in it
04:10is worth an estimated $18 billion,
04:13enough to make him the wealthiest newcomer
04:15on this year's Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans.
04:19At age 37, he is also the youngest member.
04:24For full coverage,
04:25check out Phoebe Lew's piece on Forbes.com.
04:29This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
04:32Thanks for tuning in.
04:37Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
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