echen
@echen
founder at Surge AI @HelloSurgeAI
great time w/ @saranormous @eladgil about the perils of benchmarks, SV startup monoculture, why you'll throw out 95% of your synthetic data (6 mo after the mess it made), RL richness, and why frontier math is a lot like poetry.
New 🔥 episode drop! Edwin Chen, CEO of Surge AI, is one of the best placed to understand the model landscape and evolution of data needs in AI. His hot takes: differentiation, Scale/Meta, why human data will prevail, why LMArena is “trash” and why founders need to stop hiring.
my first ever podcast! great time jamming with @HarryStebbings @20vcFund about @HelloSurgeAI, why the best researchers don't sacrifice data quality for anything, and why startups should focus on building the best product instead of hype machines
$1BN+ in revenue. $0 in funding. “I would not sell to Zuck for $100BN.” Surge AI. The best company in tech that you might not have heard of. Their Founder, Edwin, never does interviews. Today he shares all with 20VC and my top 7 takeaways 👇
This was a secret every one in the know knew.
Alex Wang timed his exit perfectly. Scale AI was being beaten by a startup rival that never raised VC and was profitable the whole time
At @Neeva we were an early customer of @SurgeHQ using them for search quality evals (pre chatgpt boom). Surge’s quality was >> scale’s.
Alex Wang timed his exit perfectly. Scale AI was being beaten by a startup rival that never raised VC and was profitable the whole time
Alex Wang timed his exit perfectly. Scale AI was being beaten by a startup rival that never raised VC and was profitable the whole time
"We all know about Scale and its epic $14B investment from Meta. But what about @HelloSurgeAI 'quietly' doing $1B+ ARR in same space -- with zero VC fundraising??"
very nice words from @timoreilly! we ❤️ people who care about good data i still dream sometimes of writing an o'reilly data science book (cover animal: wombat)... maybe it can be about post-training instead now
Small, focused teams can achieve incredible things - we've been heads down quietly building the past few years, but very proud of our team @HelloSurgeAI! theinformation.com/articles/littl…
@echen @marcua the surprising thing for us was that if you have enough words, network features don't help!