Reflection’s founders on building a DeepSeek of the West

Reflection is soon releasing Beam, its first open-weight AI model, in a bid to become the DeepSeek of the West. Trained from scratch, Beam is designed for coding, reasoning, and AI agents. Reflection's benchmarks put it alongside the strongest open models, with substantially more efficient token economics.

To mark Beam’s debut, I'm joined by Reflection's co-founders: CEO Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for Google’s Gemini, and CTO Ioannis Antonoglou, who helped create AlphaGo and AlphaZero before leading Gemini’s RLHF effort. Reflection has raised $4.6 billion from investors that include Nvidia, Sequoia, and Lightspeed.

We discuss why Chinese labs pulled ahead in open AI models, how Reflection built Beam, and why the founders think companies and countries will increasingly want to control their own models. I ask how they plan to make money from open-weight AI, whether openness can make these systems safer, and what comes next for Reflection.

Thanks to the show’s premier sponsors: Atlassian, Granola, and Mercury.