Beam: The Great American Open Model with ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin
No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Beam: The Great American Open Model with ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin

B2Upper-intermediateOctober 9, 20261 hr 9 min
  • Interview
  • Technology

Is the future of frontier AI open or closed? ReflectionAI co-founder and CEO Misha Laskin joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the launch of Beam, the company’s 500 billion parameter open-weight reasoning model. Misha breaks down the pre-training and reinforcement learning required to produce Beam’s reasoning efficiency, the shift in enterprise compute from renting to owning intelligence, and how he believes that open models will capture the majority of global token demand. He also talks about the open model ecosystem in China and why competition with China’s models is a good thing, safety considerations around open m...

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you also remove cyber defensive capabilities.

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When you remove cyber offensive capabilities, you also remove cyber defensive capabilities. The state of the world today is that we have a few hundred safety researchers within closed labs that understand how these things work.

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And despite their best intentions, it's impossible to cover the long tail of unintended consequences that these systems might have. A very powerful closed model went and like hacked into another company.

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And the only way that company could remediate itself was by using open models to protect itself. That's the empirical evidence of the world that we're in. Linus's law, with enough eyeballs, all bugs become shallow.

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