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. GPT-4 and ChatGPT had taken off, and Gemini 1 and 1.5 had shipped. He and his co-founder had worked on the reinforcement-learning side of those Gemini models. Coding, agents, and reasoning were not useful yet. The systems were chatbots.

The bet had two parts. Open models, including models from Meta, were already a base to build on, so the company would not spend its own money pre-training from scratch. The larger bet was that reinforcement learning, the trial-and-error method behind AlphaGo, could sit on language models and make them good at agentic work. Coding was the entry point, then other work on a computer, including software, legal, and finance. His co-founder had been a key contributor to AlphaGo.

The first year produced a small-scale proof that the method worked. The field then scaled reinforcement learning faster than he expected. He thought it would take years. OpenAI's o-series put reasoning in front of the public in less than a year, and Reflection's own experiments moved on the same timeline.