The Ex-DeepMind Researcher Taking On China’s Open Source AI
October 14, 2026 · 1 h
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DEBRIEFWritten and voiced by AI from the episode's audio
Misha Laskin, cofounder and CEO of Reflection AI and former DeepMind researcher, joins Jason Calacanis to discuss why enterprises are abandoning closed AI models for open-source alternatives. The shift mirrors the rental-versus-ownership evolution seen in real estate and cloud computing: as AI workloads move into production and become core business assets, companies want to own their models, control their data, cut costs, and customize for their unique needs. Reflection just launched Beam, an open-weight model trained on 10,000 GPUs with record-breaking reinforcement learning, positioning it competitively with Chinese frontier models. The conversation explores the infrastructure stack required to own AI, the rise of China's open-source dominance, cybersecurity through openness rather than secrecy, and why distributed AI development is safer than concentrated compute. Laskin argues that just as Linux and strong encryption succeeded through open collaboration, AI safety and security depend on thousands of researchers probing systems, not 500 people at closed labs.
🎧 AI Debrief
Show notes
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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:
Why companies are switching from renting AI to owning it
How Reflection sells the whole AI stack
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.
Who is moving AI onto their own servers
What it took to train Beam
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/
How reinforcement learning tasks get built
Hackers heat French supermarket fridges
The AI that broke out of its sandbox to cheat
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Why open source makes software safer
The encryption fight and Tim Cook's stand
Why China raced ahead in open models
How Beam stacks up against Chinese models
When American open models catch up
Staying independent
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