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

Can a PhD Take a Week With AI?

Misha Laskin says a PhD can now take a week. Finding the right question and executing the answer to write a doctorate took a few years. With the right question, a chat box now runs the calculation and returns something interesting.

Science has been a lifelong pursuit since a move to the States sparked an interest in physics. Over the last few years he fed language models his own doctoral thesis. Choosing the right question is a large part of the work, and the rote execution takes a long time too. A couple of years ago the models were only chat and could not act on the prompt. A year ago the answers sat at undergraduate homework level. Six months ago a model solved the thesis correctly at real doctoral level. The latest try even surfaced interesting new information he had not considered at the time.

Iteration speed is the change. News from the last day or two covered mathematical theorems OpenAI proved across a couple of weeks. The effect on science is incredible.

Grokipedia·OpenAI

Transcript

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

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

More from this episode

  1. What Was Hardest About Building Reflection AI?Misha Laskin says the hardest part of building Reflection was everything.
  2. Is Catching the AI Frontier Getting More Expensive?Misha Laskin says catching up to the frontier can be done a lot more capital efficiently, and the price still climbs every year.
  3. How Was the Open Model Beam Trained?Misha Laskin says Beam was trained as a 500-billion-parameter model, with 23 billion of those parameters active. Pre-training ran on 6,000 GB300s.
  4. What Sets a Foundation for Intelligence?Misha Laskin says code and agentic work set a foundation for intelligence, and the intelligence is jagged.
  5. Have Open Models Overtaken Closed Models?Misha Laskin says the mix of tokens on model gateways has flipped from mostly closed to mostly open, and he thinks the shift will only accelerate.
  6. When Do Enterprises Switch to Open Models?Misha Laskin says enterprises consider open models after they ramp up significant workloads on closed models.
  7. What Do Open Models Do to AI Margins?Misha Laskin says open models compress margins across the whole AI stack.
  8. How Do Chinese Open Models Help Companies in the West?Misha Laskin says companies in the West have built more durable businesses because a great open-model ecosystem came from China, and he calls that a gift.
  9. Why Is Openness Safer for AI?Misha Laskin says openness is safer for AI because openness is already the safety default in software, and a few hundred researchers inside closed labs cannot…
  10. How Does Beam Choose Its Next Training Bets?Misha Laskin says Beam chooses its next training bets by exhausting the high-impact methods the team already knows work, then expanding into riskier ideas.
  11. How Many Researchers Does a Frontier AI Lab Need?Misha Laskin estimates a steady state around an order of 100 researchers for a large effort like the one he is running.

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