-
Visceral Understanding
-
Edwin Chen emphasizes that some companies in the data space focus solely on talent supply, neglecting the technological and product aspects.
He stresses the importance of âvisceral understandingâ of data for ML engineers, encouraging them to actively engage with and analyze the data.
Edwin Chen
So there are some companies in this space who will simply think of it as a pure supply problem. And they donât give any consideration to the technology, like both the technology, the underlying technology, like, how do you identify these people? How do you make sure that theyâre doing good work? How do you remove the bad quality work? Like theyâre just literally not thinking about any of the technology aspects at all. And theyâre also not thinking about the product at all. Like, how do you present the data to the customers? Like one of our principles, like one of the principles that Iâve always had, even prior to surge when I was just an ML engineer or data scientist, one of the things that Iâve always tried To encourage is what we call this visceral understanding of the data. Like I really just want you to go in and-
Customer Alignment
-
Prioritize acquiring customers who inherently value your productâs core offering.
This ensures early adopters provide feedback aligned with your vision, shaping a product that resonates with its intended purpose.
Edwin Chen
Like I wanted people to buy us precisely because they understood the value of high quality data. They saw all the gains that our data was producing. I didnât want them to buy us simply because they heard about us in some tech cartonical. Because that would almost put them at odds with the kind of product that we were building.-
Pursuit of AGI
-
Edwin Chen is building his company to help achieve AGI, driven by a childhood dream.
He sees Surge AI as critical to the development of advanced AI, enabling companies to build what they couldnât otherwise.
Edwin Chen
Mean i think it really is to help achieve agi like if you think about every every like what do kids dream of like yeah when youâre a kid you literally dream of building ai that can do all these Amazing things. And now we have the chance to do it. Like I really do think we are such a critical aspect of what all these companies are building. Like again, a lot of our customers at these Frontiers Labs, they will just often tell me they wouldnât be able to build what theyâre building without us and just amazed at what we do. And so being able to be this critical part of what is literally the greatest technology of both our time now, but also maybe one of the most important things we can ever build. Thatâs amazing. And so why would you get acquired and stop doing that? Because yeah, getting acquired would be really limiting. It would be this
