Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Thursday, September 18th.

Today on Forbes, the AI billionaire you've never heard of.

After a morning spent reviewing a dataset, reading research papers, and playing with

cutting-edge AI models in his Manhattan apartment, Edwin Chen takes a short walk to the swank three-story Starbucks

Reserve Roastery on 9th Avenue. Dressed in a Vorey Navy t-shirt with a tiger-adorned canvas

tot slung over one shoulder, Chen heads downstairs and settles in at a dark corner table.

Sipping a small green tea, he says, quote, because ordering coffee here takes too long,

the founder and CEO of Surge AI, a data labeling and AI training firm, then launches into a

non-stop two-hour discussion about everything from Silicon Valley culture, he hates it, to his

rivals, quote, they're all body shops, to how humans might interface with aliens if they came to Earth.

He says, quote, they don't speak English, so how would you communicate with them?

How would you decipher their language?

Hopefully there'll be some mathematical way to do it.

This dilemma is also explored in his favorite short story, a 1998 piece by science fiction author

Ted Chiang.

The short story, called Story of Your Life, became the basis for the movie, A Rival,

in which a linguist tries to talk to aliens by identifying patterns in their speech

and writing.

It was also part of Chen's inspiration for starting surge in 2020, he says,

adding that he wants his data labeling company to encode the, quote, richness of humanity.

For him, that means getting the smartest humans, including professors from Stanford,

Princeton, and Harvard, to train AI, translating their specialized knowledge to the

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