Richie Steigerwald

@reflection_ai 📈 scaling RL training

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

I’m incredibly proud of what our team has assembled: a seamless environment for doing reinforcement learning at scale, putting together the best of open source, our vendors, and our own in-house tech. Now we get to go after the frontier.

[Reflection @reflection_ai]

Today we're sharing the next phase of Reflection.

We're building frontier open intelligence accessible to all.

We've assembled an extraordinary AI team, built a frontier LLM training stack, and raised $2 billion.

Why Open Intelligence Matters

Technological and scientific progress is driven by values of openness and collaboration.

The internet, Linux, and the protocols and standards that underpin modern computing are all open. This isn't a coincidence. Open software is what gets forked, customized, and embedded into systems worldwide. It's what universities teach, what startups build on, what enterprises deploy.

Open science enables others to learn from the results, be inspired by them, interrogate them, and build upon them in order to push the frontier of human knowledge and scientific advancement. AI got to where it is today through scaling ideas (e.g. self-attention, next token prediction, reinforcement learning) that were shared and published openly.

Now AI is becoming the technology layer that everything else runs on top of. The systems that accelerate scientific research, enhance education, optimize energy usage, supercharge medical diagnoses, and run supply chains will all be built on AI infrastructure.

But the frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out. There's a narrow window to change this trajectory. We need to build open models so capable that they become the obvious choice for users and developers worldwide, ensuring the foundation of intelligence remains open and accessible rather than controlled by a few.

What We've Built

Over the last year, we've been preparing for this mission.

We’ve assembled a team who have pioneered breakthroughs including PaLM, Gemini, AlphaGo, AlphaCode, AlphaProof, and contributed to ChatGPT and Character AI, among many others.

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. We saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we're now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning.

We've raised significant capital and identified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy, ensuring we can continue building and releasing frontier models sustainably. We are now scaling up to build open models that bring together large-scale pretraining and advanced reinforcement learning from the ground up.

Safety and Responsibility

Open intelligence also changes how we think about safety. It enables the broader community to participate in safety research and discourse, rather than leaving critical decisions to a few closed labs. Transparency allows independent researchers to identify risks, develop mitigations, and hold systems accountable in ways that closed development cannot.

But openness also requires confronting the challenges of capable models being widely accessible. We're investing in evaluations to assess capabilities and risks before release, security research to protect against misuse, and responsible deployment standards. We believe the answer to AI safety is not “security through obscurity” but rigorous science conducted in the open, where the global research community can contribute to solutions rather than a handful of companies making decisions behind closed doors.

Join Us

There is a window of opportunity today to build frontier open intelligence, but it is closing and this may be the last. If this mission resonates, join us.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@reflection_ai This is such an amazing team to work with. Excited for this huge opportunity!

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@willccbb Instead of typing.Any for kwargs which disables type checking, use just ‘object’ or ParamSpec

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@giffmana This is correct, is is a world model by definition but when I was involved we were interested in building a simulator for the sake of open-ended learning and the conversation changed around sora.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

Really insane stuff! Had no idea this would be possible in such short time.

[Jack Parker-Holder @jparkerholder]

Genie 3 feels like a watershed moment for world models 🌐: we can now generate multi-minute, real-time interactive simulations of any imaginable world. This could be the key missing piece for embodied AGI… and it can also create beautiful beaches with my dog, playable real time

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@jparkerholder @agrimgupta92 This is unbelievable! You actually did it 😭😭😭 amazing work!!!

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@martin_casado This looks amazing! Have you shared anything about your approach? Looks like a splat but you’d need to be inpainting with an RGBD model… great work!

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

It kills me how horrendous the ergonomics of most Google Python libraries are outside of Google. Makes me sad since it's a lot of brilliant tech.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

Announcing Asimov today! I've been using it extensively in refactoring the data pipeline to identify edge cases I might have otherwise missed.

[Misha Laskin @MishaLaskin]

Engineers spend 70% of their time understanding code, not writing it.

That’s why we built Asimov at @reflection_ai.

The best-in-class code research agent, built for teams and organizations.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@MishaLaskin @reflection_ai Asimov has been indispensable for making bigger refactors without breaking the experiments.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

I’ve started calling vibe coding "Doomcoding". It mushifies my brain in the same way...

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

SWE-Agent that takes the 9am stand-up for me.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@MishaLaskin @reflection_ai @real_ioannis 🚀🚀🚀

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

I'm really proud of the incredible team we've assembled. Everyone here is truly world-class.

[Misha Laskin @MishaLaskin]

Today I’m launching @reflection_ai with my friend and co-founder @real_ioannis.

Our team pioneered major advances in RL and LLMs, including AlphaGo and Gemini.

At Reflection, we're building superintelligent autonomous systems. Starting with autonomous coding.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@jjenzz @dariogriffo @Hasen_Judi Hi, people aren’t giving you a hard time because it’s OOTB, people are giving you a hard time because it’s wrong. Here’s an “OOTB” test case for you: [null]

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@xarkes_ @ellie_huxtable @atuinsh Syncs history across shells, sessions, and machines.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

I came across @atuinsh two months ago and it has already become the most important part of my personal workflow. It's now the first thing I install when I jump into a clean VM.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@atuinsh My feedback is that it's one of the few pieces of software that I've used that just works flawlessly wherever I go. I'm very happy.

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@cognition_labs The potential here is incredible. I've dreamed of something like this for a long time, I can't believe you've already built it!

[Richie Steigerwald @richie_internet]

@_rockt @MichaelD1729 @ashrewards @jparkerholder @YugeTen @edwardfhughes @aditimavalankar It's been an amazing time working with this brilliant and ambitious group of people. The idea seemed insane when Tim first pitched it, but it was a keen insight and he had faith in the team to preserve. Congratulations everyone on the publication!