The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Edwin Chen says he wouldn't sell Surge for $100 billion
“No, I mean, I definitely wouldn't sell for thirty billion or even a hundred billion.”
Surge AI CEO: 2,000 human data points beat 10 million synthetic ones
“A lot of them tell us that even a thousand or a couple of thousand pieces of really high quality human data that we generated for them, it's actually been worth more than ten million pieces of synthetic data.”
Chen: Surge AI has more daily working PhDs than Big Tech combined
“Like if you think of all the PhDs, even at Google or Meta or Microsoft, we have way more than all of them combined doing work for us in a single day.”
Chen expects top future AI model developers to emerge within years
“Don't think so yet. I can actually see big, new, even more powerful model developers appearing in the next few years.”
Edwin Chen: Single-person $1B companies will exist due to AI
“I mean, I absolutely believe that that company was this one day. Like you think about it, like I've always believed in 10 X engineers, even a hundred X engineers. And already you have a lot of these single person startups that are already doing ten million rev…”
Chen: Surge AI was already the largest human data provider for top AI labs
“So it's interesting because I think it was an open secret where a lot of top researchers already knew who we were. And they already knew that we were the biggest and the best in the space, even though we've been pretty under the radar. And so most people were …”
Edwin Chen admits he does not understand standard financial terms like EBITDA
“One area where I'm not great is I'm really bad at understanding financials. So sometimes people around the company, they'll try to tell me, Like, hey, do you, have you been paying attention to our revenue numbers? Have you been paying attention to our costs? H…”
Edwin Chen: AI Will Automate Average Engineers by 2028, Cure Cancer by 2038
“So I think it would be twenty-twenty-eight if you're talking about automating a job at the average engineer, and then twenty-thirty-eight if we're talking about curing cancer.”
Chen predicts future will feature multiple competing frontier AGI companies
“How I see a world where there actually will be multiple, multiple, Frontier AI companies, Frontier AGIs, just because every one of them will be able to go in a different direction. Like, you see it already, you see it today playing out already with the differe…”
Edwin Chen: Multiple single-person startups currently generate $10M in revenue
“And already you have a lot of these single person startups that are already doing ten million revenue.”
Chen: ML engineers historically neglect inspecting their training data
“Historically, a lot of ML engineers, they kind of just don't take the time to look at the data.”
Chen: Surge was profitable from its very first month
“We were very lucky to be profitable from month one.”
Chen: ChatGPT served as a massive inflection point for Surge AI
“Things definitely hit an excellent point with ChatGPT because I think people just saw how Incredibly valuable human data and RHF was. So definitely chat CPT was an inflection point for us, but even before that we were, we had very strong growth.”