News Summary

• Reflection AI, a startup founded just last year by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation.
• The company is positioning itself as both an open source alternative to closed frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic, and a Western equivalent to Chinese AI firms like DeepSeek.
• The startup was launched in March 2024 by Misha Laskin, who led reward modeling for DeepMind’s Gemini project, and Ioannis Antonoglou, who co-created AlphaGo.