Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
The 100-person AI lab that became Anthropic and Google's secret weapon | Edwin Chen (Surge AI)
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
You guys hit a billion in revenue in less than four years, with around 60 to 70 people. You're completely bootstrapped, haven't raised any VC money. I don't believe anyone has ever done this before. We basically never wanted to play this at a con rally game. That always starts ridiculous. I used to work 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 would have all these sections. So when we started Surge, we wanted to build it completely differently with a super small, super early team. You guys are, by far, the most successful data company out there. We essentially teach AI models what's good and what's bad. People don't understand what quality even means in this space. They think you could just throw bodies at a problem and good, good data, that's completely wrong. To a regular person, it doesn't feel like these models are getting that much smarter constantly. Over the past year, I've realized that the values that the companies have will shape the models. I was asking Claude to help me drop an email the other day. And after 30 minutes, yeah, I think it really crafted me the perfect email when I sent it. But then I realized that I spent 30 minutes doing something that didn't matter at all. If you could choose the perfect model behavior, which model would you want? You want a model that says you're absolutely right. There are definitely 20 more ways to improve this email and it continues for 50 more iterations. Or do you want a model that's optimizing for your time and productivity and just says, no, you need to stop. Your email's great, just send it and move on. You have this hot take that a lot of these labs are pushing a GI in the wrong direction. I'm worried that instead of building AI that will actually advance as a species, curing cancer, solving poverty, understanding universe, we are optimizing for AI stop instead. So, we're optimizing our models for the types of people who buy tabloids at the grocery store. We're basically teaching our models to chase dopamine instead of truth. - Today, my guest is Edwin Chen,
Transcription truncated.