This DeepMind Vet Raised $2B to Open-Source Frontier AI
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What is the vision behind Reflection AI's open-weight models?
We want to build the most powerful agenda models in the world and make them open weight and accessible to everyone. You can see that there are like many frontier open models coming out of China. We are like really bullish that we'll just repeat the same in the West. Open science, publications, sharing your findings, uploading your code. is something that the only way to really ensure that the progress is actually accessible by everyone and also that we can speed up the progress of intelligence and of science as a whole. Most people will just like choose the open one because like it gives you more flexibility, transparency, all else being equal, open wins every day. It is insane like how far we've come.
I've been doing AI for like almost 14 years now and kind of like thinking where the industry was when I started and like where it's now like the coding agent is like day and night. I don't see why open source cannot like be at the frontier. We built it in America, but like we don't just build it for America, right? Like we build it for the world.
So a team of former Google DeepMind researchers just raised $2 billion, you heard that right, to build America's answer to DeepSeek. So today we're going to talk about the future of open source AI and why it might determine who controls the next generation of technology. Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of The Neuron Podcast.
How does open science contribute to the advancement of AI?
I'm Corey Knowles, editor of The Neuron, and as always, I'm joined by our trusty writer, Grant Harvey. How are you today, Grant?
Doing good, Corey. I'm really excited to have this chat. I'm really pumped on this. Very bullish on open source here. Excellent.
Well, today we have a special guest. We're joined by Yanis Antonoglou, co-founder at Reflection AI. Yanis helped create AlphaGo at DeepMind, the AI that famously beat the world champion in the Game of Go back in 2016. But now he's building what they're calling Frontier Open Intelligence, powerful AI models that anyone can download and use for free. Yanis, welcome to The Neuron. It's great to have you.
It's great to be here. Thank you so much for the invitation.
Excellent. I guess my first question would be, so as someone who built AlphaGo, you know how powerful this technology can be. Why make it freely available? What's the upside for our listeners who maybe don't understand much about open source?
Yeah, that's a really good question. And maybe I can just take a couple of minutes to say a few things about me and about my background. So I'm Yanis, I'm the co-founder and CTO of Ram Technology at Reflection. We started Reflection with Misha, my co-founder, about a year and a half ago. Before that, I was a long-time DeepMinder. I actually joined DeepMind really early in 2012. before an acquisition. It was like a startup at the time. I was like one of the founding engineers. And then I did a lot of the deep reinforcement learning research that came out of DeepMind while I was there. I worked on DQN, AlphaGo, AlphaZero, NuZero, and also did RLHF for Gemini before I left. So I actually have like a lot of
kind of like experience and a lot of, you know, I've spent most of my career doing research and just like really trying to push the boundaries of like the frontier and like, you know, just ensuring that we have like the most powerful algorithms for reinforcement learning and AI in general. And one of the things that, you know, I think that like everyone who's done a lot of research can agree on is that Open science, publications, sharing your findings, uploading your code is something that is the only way to really ensure that the progress is actually accessible by everyone and also that we can speed up the progress of intelligence and of science as a whole.
So as far as the benefits for open source AI for the end user, how would you sum up those benefits for people who are used to using ChatGPT but maybe have never downloaded a model, run it on their own computer, or run it over the cloud?
Yeah, that's a really good question. The most important thing to note about open models is that they're especially useful to people who want to build with them or they want to just do more research or they want to just tinker with the model and just try and build their own solutions.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the vision behind Reflection AI's open-weight models?
0:00–1:17
2
How does open science contribute to the advancement of AI?
1:17–22:51
3
What are the benefits of open-source AI for end users?
22:51–32:20
4
What innovative architectures is Reflection AI developing?
32:20–33:07
5
How does Reflection AI plan to compete with established labs?
33:07–46:42
Speakers
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