No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
Beam: The Great American Open Model with ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin
At this moment of inflection in technology, co-hosts Elad Gil and Sarah Guo talk to the world's leading AI engineers, researchers and founders about the biggest questions: How far away is AGI? What markets are at risk for disruption? How will commerce, culture, and society change? What’s happening in state-of-the-art in research? “No Priors” is your guide to the AI revolution. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com.
Sarah Guo is a startup investor and the founder of Conviction, an investment firm purpose-built to serve intelligent software, or "Software 3.0" companies. She spent nearly a decade incubating and investing at venture firm Greylock Partners.
Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. He was co-founder of Color Health, Mixer Labs (which was acquired by Twitter). He has invested in over 40 companies now worth $1B or more each, and is also author of the High Growth Handbook.
Show Notes
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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 models, and how frontier-level open models may accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
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Chapters:
– Misha Laskin Introduction
– Latest with ReflectionAI
– Challenges Building an Open Model
– ReflectionAI’s Agentic Shift
– Resources for Model Training
– Scaling Efficiency
– Training Beam
– Where Model Value Comes From
– Beam’s Reasoning Efficiency
– Monetizing Open Weight Models
– Future of Open Versus Closed Tokens
– Competition with Open Models
– Chinese Open Source Model Ecosystem
– Will Chinese Models Remain Open
– Safety and Open Models
– Debating Access to Powerful Tools
– AI and Scientific Progress
– Data Centers and Jobs
– Beam and Scientific Research
– Research Head Count to Compute Ratio
– Conclusion
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