Misha Laskin


Misha Laskin, Reflection.ai — From Physics to SuperIntelligence

Mar 13, 2025

Misha Laskin is CEO of Reflection.ai. He was trained in theoretical physics at Yale and Chicago before becoming an AI scientist. He made important contributions in Reinforcement Learning as a researcher at Berkeley, Google DeepMind, and on the Google Gemini project.

Steve and Misha discuss:

00:00 Introduction
01:19 Misha's Early Life and Education
03:50 Transition from Physics to AI
05:47 First Startup Experience
07:19 Discovering Deep Learning
08:06 Academic Postdoc at Berkeley
14:31 Joining Google DeepMind
16:36 Reinforcement Learning and Language Models
26:42 Challenges and Future of AI
48:30 Unique Perspective from Physics
 

Ex‑DeepMind Researcher Misha Laskin on Enterprise Super‑Intelligence | Reflection AI

Jul 17, 2025

What if your company had a digital brain that never forgot, always knew the answer, and could instantly tap the knowledge of your best engineers, even after they left? Superintelligence can feel like a hand‑wavy pipe‑dream— yet, as Misha Laskin argues, it becomes a tractable engineering problem once you scope it to the enterprise level. Former DeepMind researcher Laskin is betting on an oracle‑like AI that grasps every repo, Jira ticket and hallway aside as deeply as your principal engineer—and he’s building it at Reflection AI.

In this wide‑ranging conversation, Misha explains why coding is the fastest on‑ramp to superintelligence, how “organizational” beats “general” when real work is on the line, and why today’s retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG) feels like “exploring a jungle with a flashlight.” He walks us through Asimov, Reflection’s newly unveiled code‑research agent that fuses long‑context search, team‑wide memory and multi‑agent planning so developers spend less time spelunking for context and more time shipping.

We also rewind his unlikely journey—from physics prodigy in a Manhattan‑Project desert town, to Berkeley’s AI crucible, to leading RLHF for Google Gemini—before he left big‑lab comfort to chase a sharper vision of enterprise super‑intelligence. Along the way: the four breakthroughs that unlocked modern AI, why capital efficiency still matters in the GPU arms‑race, and how small teams can lure top talent away from nine‑figure offers.

If you’re curious about the next phase of AI agents, the future of developer tooling, or the gritty realities of scaling a frontier‑level startup—this episode is your blueprint.
 
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