📝 Reflection AI raises $2B

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Reflection AI, a year-old startup founded by former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation. This comes just seven months after being valued at $545 million, cementing the company as one of the fastest-growing companies in AI. Once focused on autonomous coding, the company now aims to build a Western open-source alternative to OpenAI, Anthropic, and China’s DeepSeek. Backed by investors like Nvidia, Sequoia, and Eric Schmidt, Reflection AI says it has developed a large-scale training stack for “frontier” Mixture-of-Experts models and plans to release its first open-weight language model early next year. While datasets and infrastructure will remain private, the firm’s focus on releasing model weights reflects a pragmatic “open access” strategy—allowing researchers to experiment while charging enterprises and governments building sovereign AI systems. CEO Laskin frames the mission in geopolitical terms: ensuring the global standard of intelligence is built in the West, not defined by China.

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