{"id":291377,"date":"2025-10-10T07:32:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T07:32:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/291377\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T07:32:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T07:32:12","slug":"reflection-ai-raises-2b-to-be-americas-open-frontier-ai-lab-challenging-deepseek","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/291377\/","title":{"rendered":"Reflection AI raises $2B to be America’s open frontier AI lab, challenging DeepSeek"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflection AI<\/a>, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, a whopping 15x leap from its $545 million valuation<\/a> just seven months ago. The company, which originally focused on autonomous coding agents, is now positioning itself as both an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek.<\/p>\n

The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind\u2019s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo, the AI system that famously beat the world champion in the board game Go in 2016. Their background developing these very advanced AI systems is central to their pitch, which is that the right AI talent can build frontier models outside established tech giants.<\/p>\n

Along with its new round, Reflection AI announced that it has recruited a team of top talent from DeepMind and OpenAI, and built an advanced AI training stack that it promises will be open for all.\u00a0Perhaps most importantly, Reflection AI says it has \u201cidentified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflection AI\u2019s team currently numbers about 60 people \u2014 mostly AI researchers and engineers across infrastructure, data training, and algorithm development, per Laskin, the company\u2019s CEO. Reflection AI has secured a compute cluster and hopes to release a frontier language model next year that\u2019s trained on \u201ctens of trillions of tokens,\u201d he told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe built something once thought possible only inside the world\u2019s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale,\u201d Reflection AI wrote<\/a> in a post on X. \u201cWe saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we\u2019re now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning.\u201d<\/p>\n

MoE refers to a specific architecture that powers frontier LLMs \u2014 systems that, previously, only large, closed AI labs were capable of training at scale. DeepSeek<\/a> had a breakthrough moment when it figured out how to train these models at scale in an open way, followed by Qwen, Kimi, and other models in China.<\/p>\n

\u201cDeepSeek and Qwen and all these models are our wake-up call because if we don\u2019t do anything about it, then effectively, the global standard of intelligence will be built by someone else,\u201d Laskin said. \u201cIt won\u2019t be built by America.\u201d<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Laskin added that this puts the U.S. and its allies at a disadvantage because enterprises and sovereign states often won\u2019t use Chinese models due to potential legal repercussions.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo you can either choose to live at a competitive disadvantage or rise to the occasion,\u201d Laskin said. <\/p>\n

American technologists have largely celebrated Reflection AI\u2019s new mission. David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Czar, posted on X<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s great to see more American open source AI models. A meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost, customizability, and control that open source offers. We want the U.S. to win this category too.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clem Delangue, co-founder and CEO of Hugging Face, an open and collaborative platform for AI builders, told TechCrunch of the round, \u201cThis is indeed great news for American open-source AI.\u201d Added Delangue, \u201cNow the challenge will be to show high velocity of sharing of open AI models and datasets (similar to what we\u2019re seeing from the labs dominating in open-source AI).\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflection AI\u2019s definition of being \u201copen\u201d seems to center on access rather than development, similar to strategies from Meta with Llama or Mistral. Laskin said Reflection AI would release model weights \u2014 the core parameters that determine how an AI system works \u2014 for public use while largely keeping datasets and full training pipelines proprietary.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn reality, the most impactful thing is the model weights, because the model weights anyone can use and start tinkering with them,\u201d Laskin said. \u201cThe infrastructure stack, only a select handful of companies can actually use that.\u201d<\/p>\n

That balance also underpins Reflection AI\u2019s business model. Researchers will be able to use the models freely, Laskin said, but revenue will come from large enterprises building products on top of Reflection AI\u2019s models and from governments developing \u201csovereign AI\u201d systems, meaning AI models developed and controlled by individual nations.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce you get into that territory where you\u2019re a large enterprise, by default you want an open model,\u201d Laskin said. \u201cYou want something you will have ownership over. You can run it on your infrastructure. You can control its costs. You can customize it for various workloads. Because you\u2019re paying some ungodly amount of money for AI, you want to be able to optimize it as much as much as possible, and really that\u2019s the market that we\u2019re serving.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reflection AI hasn\u2019t yet released its first model, which will be largely text-based, with multimodal capabilities in the future, according to Laskin. It will use the funds from this latest round to get the compute resources needed to train the new models, the first of which the company is aiming to release early next year.<\/p>\n

Investors in Reflection AI\u2019s latest round include Nvidia, Disruptive, DST, 1789, B Capital, Lightspeed, GIC, Eric Yuan, Eric Schmidt, Citi, Sequoia, CRV, and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reflection AI, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":291378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[691,738,2013,3226,2719,77037,149366,158,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-291377","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-deepseek","11":"tag-open-ai","12":"tag-open-source","13":"tag-reflection","14":"tag-reflection-ai","15":"tag-technology","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115348710736481665","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}