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Back to The American Startup Taking On China’s AI Models, with Misha Laskin.

How Does Reflection Make Money From an Open Model?

Misha Laskin says Reflection makes money from Beam, its open model, by charging enterprises and the public sector for the systems around it: serving inference, packaging agents, and fine-tuning.

Open weight is one form of open source, because weights belong to deep learning and did not exist in earlier software. Open source purists argue a release is not open source unless the data and the training recipes are open too. The company mission is to build open intelligence and make it widely accessible, so the goal is to open source as much as possible in order to make the models easy to consume. Beam launched with 40 partners and integrations into open source fine-tuning frameworks. The team also released an open source agentic harness called MIR and is about to release a tech report that writes up how the systems were built, so other researchers can build on the work.

Good models still require buying a lot of proprietary data, and the contracts do not allow releasing that data, because selling data is someone else's business. Open source does not mean open sourcing absolutely everything. The open release is for the scientific community, the research community, and the developer community. Enterprise and public-sector adoption is where the business charges for the systems around the model.

Transcript

The American Startup Taking On China’s AI Models ·

Prof G Markets

More from this episode

  1. Why Did Misha Laskin Get Into Physics?Misha Laskin got interested in physics after he moved to the United States as a kid.
  2. Why Did Misha Laskin Start Reflection?Misha Laskin started Reflection in 2024 because the models then were good at chat and not at work someone could leave them to finish.
  3. Why Does America Need Its Own Open AI Models?Misha Laskin says America needs its own open AI models because open technology is what other countries adopt, and the country that ships it brings its…
  4. What Is the Difference Between an Open and a Closed AI Model?Misha Laskin says a closed AI model is something you can only rent, and an open model is something you can own.
  5. Why Should AI Intelligence Get Cheaper?Misha Laskin says the amount of intelligence available per watt will keep increasing, so the cost of intelligence should be driven down as far as possible in…
  6. Why Are Open AI Model Builders Six Months Ahead?Misha Laskin says an open model builder stays six months ahead because building the model also builds a state-of-the-art stack for serving it, for agents…
  7. Are Chinese Open AI Models a Gift to American Startups?Misha Laskin says Chinese open models are a gift to American startups, and he rejects the idea that the releases are simply bad for Western markets.
  8. How Do Chinese Open Models Spread Chinese Chips?Misha Laskin says Chinese open models threaten American national security because countries that adopt them also get locked into Chinese chips and data centers.
  9. What Is Reflection Building?Misha Laskin says Reflection is building a generational company around open models, and he wants it to be a leader rather than the only American lab in the…

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