open-weights
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Robin Rombach Took the Long Way Home to the Future of Images
Robin Rombach helped make image generation practical, then went home to Freiburg to build the next chapter. At Black Forest Labs, his argument for open visual AI has travelled from research papers to the G7 table.
Misha Laskin
Misha Laskin is the co-founder and CEO of Reflection AI, a New York lab building open-weight frontier models and autonomous coding agents. A theoretical physicist by training (Yale, University of Chicago), he led reward modeling for Google DeepMind's Gemini and worked in reinforcement learning at Berkeley and DeepMind before launching Reflection in 2024 with AlphaGo co-creator Ioannis Antonoglou. In 2025 the company raised roughly $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation, positioning itself as America's open-source answer to DeepSeek.