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

<p><strong>Edwin Chen</strong> is the founder and CEO of Surge AI, the company that teaches AI what’s good vs. what’s bad, powering frontier labs with elite data, environments, and evaluations. Surge surpassed $1 billion in revenue with under 100 employees last year, completely bootstrapped—the fastest company in history to reach this milestone. Before founding Surge, Edwin was a research scientist at Google, Facebook, and Twitter and studied mathematics, computer science, and linguistics at MIT.</p><p></p><p><strong>We discuss:</strong></p><p>1. How Surge reached over $1 billion in revenue with fewer than 100 people by obsessing over quality</p><p>2. The story behind how Claude Code got so good at coding and writing</p><p>3. The problems with AI benchmarks and why they’re pushing AI in the wrong direction</p><p>4. How RL environments are the next frontier in AI training</p><p>5. Why Edwin believes we’re still a decade away from AGI</p><p>6. Why taste and human judgment shape which AI ...