Billionaires just got a little bit younger on average with the addition of a new AI whiz who became the freshest member of the Forbes 400 despite the fact you've probably never heard of him.
Most people these days would say that they probably hear a little bit too much about the individuals at the top of lists charting the world's wealthiest individuals, with names like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg dominating the news.
That certainly isn't changing any time soon with the advent of artificial intelligence either, as it's rapid development and increasing important in global society means that these people are becoming increasingly powerful as time goes on.
There are sometimes newer and fresher faces that pop up out of nowhere though to assert their influence, and that's exactly what's happened with the comparatively unknown Edwin Chen — a 37-year-old ex-Google, Facebook, and Twitter employee who has become a billionaire off the back of AI.
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As reported by Forbes, Chen has now officially become the youngest member of its 'Forbes 400' society, which is a list of the richest people in the world.
While he earned his stripes across a handful of the world's biggest tech companies, he decided to ditch Silicon Valley culture – which he made clear his distain towards – in favor of Manhattan, where he built his own AI data labeling company, Surge.
Chen expressed how he desires for his own company to encode the "richness of humanity," and he has enlisted some of the smartest minds in the country to help him achieve this by training large language models.
On top of this, he currently pays over a million gig workers across the world to come up with questions that AI models can't currently answer – and that might be easier than you'd expect in some cases – and it's all in a bid to work towards artificial general intelligence (AGI) and achieving the 'perfect' response.
"I really do think that what we're doing is so critical to all the AI models that without us, AGI just won't happen," Chen explained, asserting "and I want it to happen."
This is very much a goal that the wider tech industry currently shares, and some of the most powerful individuals adjacent to AI believe that we're closer than you might expect to achieving it, resulting in artificial intelligence that matches and potentially even exceeds the knowledge and capabilities of humans.
Chen's company Surge has done things differently compared to many of his Silicon Valley peers too, as he received no venture capital investment and instead kickstarted his dream with "a couple million" dollars that he'd saved from his time working at places like Google and Facebook.
Surge has now just registered over $1.2 billion in revenue for 2024 just five years after it was first founded, and boasts over 250 employees across full-time, part-time, and consultant roles – although this is small compared to its contemporaries.
What has allowed Chen to catapult himself into the Forbes 400 though is his 75% stake in the company he founded, which works out to roughly $18 billion and appears as if it will only continue to rise in the near future.