The humans training AI to be better
The Times Tech Podcast
Will Morley
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2025
⏱️ 47 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What is Artificial General Intelligence? How close are we to achieving it? And who exactly is building it? Danny and Katie look at the global race for artificial general intelligence and speak with Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen, whose company uses human experts to train frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. He believes only human expertise will get AI to the next level.
Image credit: Surge AI
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I got sent a present by Microsoft. |
| 0:05.0 | Oh no, that's not a Microsoft jumper, is it? |
| 0:09.0 | It's a Microsoft Christmas jumper. |
| 0:10.0 | Oh, God. |
| 0:11.0 | I mean if you can see. |
| 0:12.0 | Of course it's got Clippy. |
| 0:14.0 | It's got Clippy on it. |
| 0:16.0 | It's got a Minecraft thing, can you see, |
| 0:19.0 | internet explorer. You get the worst swag. No shade. |
| 0:27.5 | Hello and welcome to the Times Tech podcast where every week we unpack how technology is |
| 0:32.8 | reshaping business, culture and everyday life. I am Danny Fortson out here in Silicon Valley. |
| 0:39.3 | And I'm Katie Prescott here in the city of London. And in this episode, we're going to dive into |
| 0:45.4 | what's really being seen as the jackpot in the world of tech, artificial general intelligence or |
| 0:51.1 | AGI, and the bitterly fought race that's going on to build it. |
| 0:54.6 | We'll look at what it is, what it takes to get there, the algorithms, the chips, and most |
| 0:59.8 | importantly, of course, the many, many humans in the loop. Always humans in the loop. |
| 1:05.4 | Always, always. Yeah, so our big interview this week to talk about all of that is Edwin Chen. |
| 1:11.8 | He's a former Google and Twitter data scientist who now runs Surge AI, a company that |
| 1:17.6 | uses human expertise to train AI systems. |
| 1:21.5 | They say their mission is to, quote, raise AGI with the richness of human intelligence. |
| 1:31.1 | Terrifying. Really great interview. I'm looking forward to that. And we're also going to be talking about one of the original tech giants, |
| 1:35.8 | not the one on my Christmas jumper. No. It's big rival Apple as it approaches its 50th anniversary. |
... |
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