What Was Hardest About Building Reflection AI?

Misha Laskin says the hardest part of building Reflection was everything. The team has to get 30 things right, and that is why the work stays hard on every front.

For the last 12 months the mission was to build frontier open intelligence and make it widely accessible, sprinting to stand up a lab while assembling a plane in flight. About a year ago there were around 30 people. A true rocket ship project takes an order of 100 plus people, a couple hundred researchers and engineers. Reflection is now around 300 people. Teams cover pre-training, mid-training, and reinforcement learning. They scaled up, trained the first models end to end, and released Beam, Reflection's first open model. Talent has to be hired and retained. A strong mission and culture have to keep people rowing in the same boat. Data, compute, and infrastructure that makes the compute usable have to come together too.

Years of build-out give an existing big lab a stable surface. He was at DeepMind before Reflection, and tools he took for granted as a researcher, because they just worked, have to be built.