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

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

October 9, 2026

Duration

1h 10m

Channel

No Priors

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

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 show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @MishaLaskin | @reflection_ai Chapters: 00:05 – Misha Laskin Introduction 00:22 – Latest with ReflectionAI 01:30 – Challenges Building an Open Model 03:19 – ReflectionAI’s Agentic Shift 07:00 – Resources for Model Training 09:32 – Scaling Efficiency 11:43 – Training Beam 16:14 – Where Model Value Comes From 19:18 – Beam’s Reasoning Efficiency 21:58 – Monetizing Open Weight Models 24:28 – Future of Open Versus Closed Tokens 30:54 – Competition with Open Models 34:01 – Chinese Open Source Model Ecosystem 38:03 – Will Chinese Models Remain Open 44:07 – Safety and Open Models 52:25 – Debating Access to Powerful Tools 56:39 – AI and Scientific Progress 59:59 – Data Centers and Jobs 01:01:32 – Beam and Scientific Research 01:05:03 – Research Head Count to Compute Ratio 01:10:18 – Conclusion

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Misha Laskin

  guest

  Co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI and former Google DeepMind researcher releasing the open-weight model Beam.

• Sarah Guo

  host

  Host of No Priors and founder of Conviction, a venture firm focused on AI.

• Elad Gil

  host

  Host of No Priors and investor/entrepreneur known for early-stage tech and AI investing.

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of No Priors, featuring Misha Laskin and Sarah Guo, Beam: The Great American Open Model with ReflectionAI Co-Founder and CEO Misha Laskin explores reflectionAI’s Beam and the case for frontier open-weight models ReflectionAI’s Misha Laskin describes the company’s sprint from a ~30-person startup to a ~300-person lab capable of training and releasing Beam, its first frontier-class open-weight model.

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