Misha Laskin
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Prof G Markets · The American Startup Taking On China’s AI Models
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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 field. The plan is to keep releasing strong open models and to deploy them into enterprises, the public sector, and sovereign accounts.
China's advantage, as he describes it, is that a handful of companies keep leapfrogging one another, so good models keep arriving. He hopes a similar ecosystem of open-model builders comes out of the United States this year and next, comparable in quality to the Chinese one. Reflection should be a standalone leader inside that group. He does not comment on media speculation. The plan he will describe is
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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. Ed Elson had described China's open-weight push as a mission to erode the margins of American AI businesses and upend the market, a flood of supply meant to damage the companies that pulled ahead. Laskin says the intentions matter less than the result. Great open models, wherever they come from, are something people can build on.
Closed labs crowded some of the best startups, not out of malice. Coding is lucrative, so those labs built a vertical product around it. Startups that also wanted to sell coding agents moved onto Chinese open models, c
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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. Renting leaves you exposed to a price hike or a cutoff, while someone else runs the system. Owning means the model can be handed over, even on a flash drive, and run on your own computers. He compares it to renting an apartment versus buying a house: one is convenient, the other is control plus the problems that come with it.
Ed Elson had assumed open also means free, in the sense that anyone can use the model, build on it, and customize it. Laskin agrees that is how most open models work today, and he says open does not have to mean free. A license can sit on an open model and be
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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 infrastructure with it. About a year before this conversation, Western open models were falling behind. Chinese open models arrived strong, including DeepSeek V3, around the same time reasoning models reached the public, and a wider set of strong Chinese models followed. Reflection's answer was to take on what he calls the open intelligence mission.
The pattern is already familiar. Linux is the widely adopted operating system for computers, Android is the one for phones, and internet protocols are open. Those came from America, and the rest o
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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. Cod
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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.
Allies abroad adopt whichever technology stack is best. Linux and Android came from America, and America has traditionally built the best open source technology in the world. Open models are the first case of something so major that did not originate in America, so countries abroad are building on Chinese technology. The model is only the engine, and the car around it is the chips. When Chinese companies sell open models into the Middle East, other Asian countries, or Brazil, they also start selling chips and data centers. Allied go
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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 around it, and for fine-tuning. By the time the weights are released, that supporting technology was already in place.
In China, as he sees it from the outside, the model is given away free abroad because people abroad do not want to use the Chinese API, so it cannot really be monetized there. That giveaway also pushes competitors' margins down. The Western market is competitive in a different way. Releasing an open model creates distributors that can serve it, and the builder still keeps the technical lead.
A builder that is strategic to
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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 order to use more of it. The pattern is a classic Jevons paradox. Intelligence should not be seen as a premium product like an Apple iPhone. Intelligence is more like electricity and water, and it should be a commodity.
The whole system around intelligence is expensive, and there will still be some margin, but margins on inference today are very healthy for both closed model inference and open model inference. On whether very expensive training will bring subsidies like the support federal, state, and local governments give utilities s
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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 a
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Why Did Misha Laskin Get Into Physics?
Misha Laskin got interested in physics after he moved to the United States as a kid. His family moved to a rural part of Washington State, he had a lot of time on his hands, and that is when the interest took hold.
He treats the Hanford site as one possible piece of it. The area was one of the Manhattan Project places, the Hanford site where the plutonium was enriched, so it already had a rich history of physics. What he really liked was that physics is a fundamental science, based on simple principles that could explain most of what people observe, and that it sits at the root of technologies used every day. He saw physics as the fundamental science of the 20th century.
The first computer