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IBL News | New York
Reflection AI, a startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers in March 2024, raised $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation this month.
Investors in this latest round include Nvidia, Disruptive, DST, 1789, B Capital, Lightspeed, GIC, Eric Yuan, Eric Schmidt, Citi, Sequoia, CRV, and others.
Along with its financial injection, Reflection AI — which provides a Chinese DeepSeek-style open source alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic — announced that it has recruited a team of top talent from DeepMind and OpenAI, forming a current team of about 60 people — mostly AI researchers and engineers across infrastructure, data training, and algorithm development.
Reflection AI hasn’t yet released its first model, which will be largely text-based, but it plans to add multimodal capabilities in the future. The company will use the funds from this latest round to acquire the computing resources needed to train the new models, the first of which it aims to release early next year.
“We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale,” Reflection AI wrote in a post on X.
“DeepSeek and Qwen and all these models are our wake-up call because if we don’t do anything about it, then effectively, the global standard of intelligence will be built by someone else, but not in America.”
DeepSeek had a breakthrough moment when it figured out how to train MoE-based architecture models at scale in an open way, followed by Qwen, Kimi, and other models in China.
David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Czar, posted on X: “It’s great to see more American open source AI models. A meaningful segment of the global market will prefer the cost, customizability, and control that open source offers. We want the U.S. to win this category too.”
