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

Is the future of frontier AI open or closed? ReflectionAI co-founder and CEO Misha Laskin joins Sarah Guo and Elad Gil to discuss the launch of Beam, the company’s 500 billion parameter open-weight reasoning model. Misha breaks down the pre-training and reinforcement learning required to produce Beam’s reasoning efficiency, the shift in enterprise compute from renting to owning intelligence, and how he believes that open models will capture the majority of global token demand. He also talks about the open model ecosystem in China and why competition with China’s models is a good thing, safety considerations around open models, and how frontier-level open models may accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.   Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to [email protected] Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @MishaLaskin | @reflection_ai Chapters: 00:42 – Misha Laskin Introduction 00:59 – Latest with ReflectionAI 02:07 – Challenges Building an Open Model 03:56 – ReflectionAI’s Agentic Shift 07:37 – Resources for Model Training 10:09 – Scaling Efficiency 12:18 – Training Beam 16:51 – Where Model Value Comes From 19:55 – Beam’s Reasoning Efficiency 22:35 – Monetizing Open Weight Models 25:03 – Future of Open Versus Closed Tokens 31:29 – Competition with Open Models 34:38 – Chinese Open Source Model Ecosystem 38:40 – Will Chinese Models Remain Open 44:44 – Safety and Open Models 53:02 – Debating Access to Powerful Tools 57:16 – AI and Scientific Progress 01:00:36 – Data Centers and Jobs 01:02:07 – Beam and Scientific Research 01:05:37 – Research Head Count to Compute Ratio 01:10:29 – Conclusion