Edwin Chen

“Yeah, so we hit over a billion of revenue last year with under a hundred people.”

“And I think we're going to see companies with even crazier ratios, like a hundred billion per employee in the next few years. AI is just going to get better and better and make things more efficient. So that ratio just becomes inevitable.”

“Like I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies, and I always felt that we could fire 90% of people and we would move faster because the best people wouldn't have all these distractions.”

“I think most people don't understand what quality even means in this space. They think you can just throw bodies at a problem and get good data, and that's completely wrong.”

“The way it works is we essentially gather thousands of signals about everything that you're doing when you're working on a platform. So we are looking at your keyboard strokes. We are looking how fast you answer things. We are using reviews. We are using code …”

“I don't trust the benchmarks at all. And I think that's for two reasons. So one is, I think a lot of people don't realize, even researchers within the community, they don't realize that the benchmarks themselves are often honestly just wrong. Like they have wr…”

“The easiest way to climb Alamarina, it's adding crazy boating. It's doubling the number of emojis. It's tripling the length of your model responses. Even if your model starts hallucinating and getting the answer completely wrong.”

“I would say I've always been very, very impressed by Anthropic. Like, I think Anthropic takes a very principled view about what they do and don't care about. And how they want their models to behave in a way that feels a lot more principle to me.”

“I'm in a camp where I do believe that something new will be needed.”

“I think we were very, very lucky to be profitable from the start. So we didn't need the money. It always felt weird to give up control.”

“Like I would never hire data scientists when the first three people in a company. And I say that because I used to be a data scientist. Like data scientists are great when you want to optimize your product by two percent or five percent, but that's definitely …”

“Product managers are great when your company gets big enough. But at the beginning, you should be thinking about yourself about what product you want to build. And your engineer should be hands-on. They should be having great ideas as well.”

“One of the things I think is a giant plague on AI is Elimsis, Elimarena.”

“So internally we do a lot of work actually today with working with all the frontier labs to help them understand their models. So again, we're constantly evaluating them. We're constantly surfacing loss areas for them to improve on and so on and so on.”

“A lot of researchers, they'll tell us that their VPs make them focus on increasing their rank on LMSYS. And so I've had researchers explicitly tell me that they're okay with making their models worse. Add factuality works at following instructions as long as i…”

“I think a lot of the other companies in our space, they're just not technology companies at the end of the day. They are either body shops or they are body shops masquerading as technology companies.”

“Yeah, so I think the biggest lesson for me was that you can build a completely different kind of company with 10% of the resources and 10% of the people, but you're still moving 10 times faster and building a 10 times better product.”

“At these bigger companies, a lot of your priorities, a lot of the things that you're building, they're simply, you're simply building them to impress someone. Like, hey, I need to impress my VP. I need to impress my manager. I need to impress my director so th…”

“I think a big part of it actually just boils down to the kinds of questions they ask me. Like some people, when I interview them, they will ask really interesting questions about our product. They will brainstorm about ideas to make our product even better. Th…”

“So like I, for example, personally, I actually have no one-on-one meetings and it's kind of funny because oftentimes people will ask me, well, How often do you meet with your reports? How often do you set aside for, like, for these meetings? I just don't have …”

“Like, it's almost like a negative sign if you're having a one-on-one weekly meeting, because it means that you just don't know what's going on with these people. You're not, you're like almost waiting for your weekly meeting to raise, raise interesting questio…”

“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…”

“And already you have a lot of these single person startups that are already doing ten million revenue.”

“Some people are simply two to three times better, like two to three times faster than anybody else, right? They just code faster. There are some people who simply have two to three times more better ideas. There are people who simply work two to three times as…”

“If you don't have to spend that time on the drudgery, but you just have like these endless ideas that are just bouncing around your head and AI just helps you put them to paper. Then I do think it kind of disproportionately favors people who are already like t…”

“As opposed to feeling like I needed to go out and hire 10 engineers in order to build a product, instead of feeling like I needed to go out and fundraise, you know, 10, 20, thirty million dollars in order to hire, you know, more people. Again, I just wanted to…”

“Yeah, for a 90% of companies, no. Like, sure, there are some companies where you actually do need a lot of capital in order to build hardware or, like, whatever it is for a couple years. Like you really need a lot of investment before, before you before you ca…”

“There are some companies in this space who will simply think of it as a pure supply problem, and they don't give any consideration to the technology, like both the technology, the underlying technology, like, how do you identify these people? How do you make s…”

“So every now and then, if something is important enough, like maybe there's some big new product is actually really cool, or there's some really, really interesting new research paper. It'll be like big enough that even though I'm not monitoring Twitter every …”

“No, I mean, I definitely wouldn't sell for thirty billion or even a hundred billion.”

“Because yeah, getting acquired would be really limiting. It would be this admission of failure and jumping ship because you can't make it on your own anymore.”

“So I would definitely rank data quality first, followed by compute, followed by the IRLs.”

“So LM Arena is this popular leaderboard of LM models, and it's basically the equivalent of clickbait.”

“And so one of the, I mean, one of the things that we've learned is that the easiest way to improve in this arena is simply to make your model responses a lot longer.”

“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…”

“I think a lot of people do confuse working hard with creating value. Like again, I mean, it's maybe a trope to say, but you have to work smart and not just hard. Like, if I think about a lot of what I'm doing, oftentimes the best ideas come to me when I'm just…”

“So I think a lot of people think AI safety is overblown, but I think they ignore the paperclip maximizer problem where you have AI models that are accidentally trained towards the wrong objectives, even though this is a big problem that all the models face tod…”

“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…”

“Don't think so yet. I can actually see big, new, even more powerful model developers appearing in the next few years.”

“So this company is only five years old. And it's it was leaked that they did one billion dollars in revenue in the last 12 months. And this guy, Edwin Chen, he's only 37 years old, and he owns 100% of the company. They have not taken any outside funding.”

“And unlike scale, surge was profitable and has been from the beginning, Chen said.”

“Chen has distinguished Surge by making it the high-end shop, charging premium rates often two to five times what scale might bill.”