Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen has voiced his strong dislike for the term "data labeling," calling it misleading and reductive. In a recent conversation on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, Chen explained that the phrase evokes images of simple, repetitive tasks—like tagging cat photos or drawing boxes around cars—when in reality, the work his company does is far more complex and meaningful. Chen, who previously held roles at Google, Twitter, and Meta, said he has "always hated the word data labeling" because it fails to capture the depth of what’s actually involved. "It just paints this very simplistic picture when I think what we're doing is completely different," he said. Founded in 2020, Surge AI competes with major players like Scale AI and Mercor in the AI data services space. The company partners with Anthropic and operates DataAnnotation.tech, a platform that connects freelance workers—often called "ghost workers"—with opportunities to train AI models. These individuals contribute their expertise in ways that are essential to shaping how AI understands the world. Chen described the process not as mechanical labeling, but as a deeply creative and thoughtful act. He compared it to raising a child. "I think a lot about what we're doing as a lot more like raising a child," he said. "You don't just feed a child information. You're teaching them values, and creativity, and what's beautiful, and these infinite subtle things about what makes somebody a good person." In this light, he views Surge AI’s mission as "raising humanity's children"—helping to shape the intelligence of future AI systems. This philosophy is reflected on Surge AI’s website, which opens with the question: "What made Hemingway, Kahlo, and von Neumann extraordinary?" The site answers by highlighting the rich life experiences—war, love, loss, travel—that shaped these figures, then draws a parallel: "Data does for AI what life did for them — transforming it into intelligence that could one day prove the Riemann hypothesis, imagine new philosophies, and send rockets to the stars." Chen also shared personal reflections on starting his own company. Having worked in large tech firms, he once believed that entrepreneurship meant becoming a traditional "business person"—spending days in meetings, obsessing over financials, and constantly promoting himself. "I thought if I started a company, I'd have to become a business person looking at financials all day, and being in meetings all day, and doing all this stuff that sounded incredibly boring, and I always hated," he said. To his surprise, that wasn’t the case. "I was shocked to find out that I never had to stop burying my head in the data," he said. He realized that success didn’t require constant self-promotion, endless fundraising, or pretending to be someone he wasn’t. "You don't need to become someone you're not," he said. "You can actually build a successful company by simply building something so good that it cuts through all that noise." Chen added that if he had known this earlier, he would have started Surge AI much sooner.