Reflection, backed by $4.6B from Nvidia and Sequoia, to launch open-weight model Beam as 'DeepSeek of the West'
bigblueboo · x · 2026-10-06
Reflection's co-founders join Alex Heath's Sources podcast ahead of Beam, their first open-weight model. Trained from scratch for coding, reasoning, and agents, Beam reportedly matches the strongest open models on benchmarks with more efficient token economics. CEO Misha Laskin led reward modeling for Google's Gemini; CTO Ioannis helped create AlphaGo/AlphaZero and led Gemini's RLHF. The company has raised $4.6B from Nvidia, Sequoia, and Lightspeed. The interview also covers why Chinese labs pulled ahead in open models and why companies and nations increasingly want sovereign control over their own models.
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