How a former Google employee became the youngest member of the 400 richest people in the USA list

Against the backdrop of the AI industry revolution, Edwin Chen, a former Google, Facebook, and Twitter employee, quietly created his own company, Surge AI, specializing in data labeling. Now the youngest member of the Forbes 2025 list of 400 richest people in America is ready to come out of the shadows and make himself known.

After spending the morning reviewing a dataset, reading scientific papers, and experimenting with cutting-edge AI models in his Manhattan apartment, Edwin Chen set out for a short walk to the stylish three-story Starbucks Reserve Roastery on Ninth Avenue.

Dressed in a navy blue Vuori t-shirt and with a canvas tote bag with a tiger across his shoulder, Chen went downstairs and took a table in a secluded corner. His choice fell on a small cup of green tea, "since the coffee in this place is too expensive." In this secluded spot, the founder and CEO of Surge AI, a company specializing in data labeling and AI training, started a two-hour endless discussion that touched on all possible topics: from Silicon Valley culture (which he hates) to his competitors ("they are all just a conveyor belt with not the best specialists") and how humans might establish contact with aliens if they came to Earth. "They don't speak English. So how do you communicate with them? How do you decipher their language? I hope there's some mathematical way to do this," he muses.

The problem of establishing contact with alien life forms is also explored in Chen's favorite story, "Story of Your Life," published in 1998 by science fiction writer Ted Chiang. This work became the basis for the film "Arrival," in which a linguist tries to find a way to communicate with aliens by identifying patterns in their speech and writing. According to Chen, this theme also partially inspired him to create Surge AI in 2020, adding that he wants his data labeling company to be able to capture "all the diversity of human nature." For this purpose, he attracts the smartest people (including professors from Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard universities) to train AI, turning their specialized knowledge into the binary code that underlies large language models. In addition to the Ivy League geniuses, Chen is assembling an army of more than a million so-called gig workers from more than 50 countries around the world who help devise complex questions for AI, evaluate model responses, and develop criteria that help AI generate the perfect answer. "I truly believe our work is critically important for all AI models. Without us, AGI [Artificial General Intelligence, a technical term referring to the concept of AI capable of matching or even