Reflection AI is a New York-based artificial intelligence lab founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou. It is building autonomous coding agents and open frontier language models, with the stated ambition of reaching superintelligence by first solving software engineering. Its flagship product, Asimov, is a code research and comprehension agent for large codebases. After raising $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation in October 2025, the company has positioned itself as an open, Western alternative to closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and to Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek.
Zyphra is a superintelligence research and product company building efficient, open foundation models and a full-stack AI cloud. Best known for its SSM-hybrid Zamba models, the ZAYA1 reasoning family trained entirely on AMD hardware, and the Zonos text-to-speech system, Zyphra argues that frontier intelligence should run cheaply, locally, and outside the walled gardens of a handful of labs. In June 2025 it raised a $100M Series A at a $1B valuation led by Jaan Tallinn.
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.
Stephanie Zhan is a General Partner on Sequoia Capital's early-stage team, where she has been backing founders from the first check since 2015. A Stanford computer science graduate who grew up across Hong Kong and Beijing during the early internet era, she brings a global lens and a deep technical instinct to bets on AI, developer tools, and the physical world. She was first partner to Linear, Reflection AI, Skild AI, Ricursive Intelligence, Mach Industries, Middesk, and Tavus - a portfolio that reads like a map of the next decade of computing. Her TED AI talk on superintelligent AI captures what makes her unusual among her peers: she's not just predicting the future, she's actively funding the people building it.
Dan Hendrycks is the Executive Director of the Center for AI Safety (CAIS), the UC Berkeley PhD who created MMLU - the benchmark that shaped how the world measures AI intelligence - and invented GELU, the activation function running inside BERT, GPT, and virtually every major AI model. From a rural evangelical town in Missouri, he's become one of AI safety's most consequential voices, advising Elon Musk's xAI and Scale AI while sounding alarms about civilizational-scale AI risk, accepting $1/year to keep his independence intact.
Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and one of the most consequential figures in the artificial intelligence era. A Stanford dropout who built his first startup at 19, Altman ran Y Combinator for five years before going all-in on OpenAI's mission to build safe superintelligence. He survived a dramatic 5-day ouster from his own company in 2023, returned to thunderous employee support, and has since steered OpenAI to a $300 billion valuation. He holds no equity in OpenAI, yet built a $3+ billion personal fortune through early bets on Reddit, Stripe, Airbnb, and a cluster of deep-tech moonshots.