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The Ex-DeepMind Researcher Taking On China’s Open Source AI

· 1 h 00 min

Episode The Ex-DeepMind Researcher Taking On China’s Open Source AI

0:00 1:00:23

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Today’s show:

Misha Laskin of Reflection AI joins Jason to explain why big companies are done renting their AI from closed labs. Enterprises want to keep their data, cut their costs, and tune their models to their unique businesses.

Reflection is launching its first open-weight model, Beam, just three months after acquiring its first big cluster. Misha admits that Beam trails the best Chinese open models by a couple of months, and needs 3 to 4 times fewer tokens to reach the same answer, but nonetheless, the race is on.

PLUS, Misha explains how “reward hacking” led that rogue OpenAI model to break out of its test sandbox and steal the answers from Hugging Face's servers. The model solved the problem, just not the way anyone intended.

There’s simply no way a few hundred safety researchers at closed labs can catch every flaw; open source is how software has always been made secure. It's also why he wants America to lead in open models again.

So how close is America to catching up to the Chinese open source leaders? Watch this brand new TWiST and find out.

Guests:

Misha Laskin on X: https://x.com/MishaLaskin

Reflection AI: https://reflection.ai/

Relevant Links:

Introducing Beam, Reflection's first open model (Reflection AI) → https://reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam

Reflection AI unveils Beam as an open answer to Chinese labs (Semafor) → https://www.semafor.com/article/10/05/2026/reflection-ai-unveils-an-open-source-answer-to-chinese-labs

Cursor's Composer 2 coding model, built on an open model (VentureBeat) → https://venturebeat.com/technology/cursors-new-coding-model-composer-2-is-here-it-beats-claude-opus-4-6-but

micro1 passes $1 billion annual run rate, mentioned by Jason → https://www.einnews.com/pr_news/949082966/micro1-end-of-q3-update

Hackers heat French supermarket fridges, sparking fires and spoiling food (CNN) → https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/12/europe/france-supermarket-cyberattack-fridges-intl

Hugging Face postmortem on the OpenAI agent that broke out of its sandbox → https://huggingface.co/blog/agent-intrusion-technical-timeline

NVIDIA OpenShell, an open-source sandbox for AI agents → https://docs.nvidia.com/openshell/latest/about/overview.html

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Why companies are switching from renting AI to owning it

00:09:10 How Reflection sells the whole AI stack

00:10:24 Paper is the legal backbone for thousands of startup founders and fund managers - including Launch. Use getpaper.ai/twist to get your cap table free for a year - or two years if you're leaving Carta.

00:11:28 Who is moving AI onto their own servers

00:14:37 What it took to train Beam

00:20:26 Superhuman Go is an AI chat that's always there when you need it, already aware of what you're doing, and doesn't ask you to start from zero. Sign up to get the best in AI at https://superhuman.com/

00:21:29 How reinforcement learning tasks get built

00:26:41 Hackers heat French supermarket fridges

00:29:07 The AI that broke out of its sandbox to cheat

00:31:05 The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist

00:33:10 Why open source makes software safer

00:38:13 The encryption fight and Tim Cook's stand

00:42:53 Why China raced ahead in open models

00:47:35 How Beam stacks up against Chinese models

00:50:21 When American open models catch up

00:58:39 Staying independent

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