Exclusive: Reflection AI to power Genesis Mission
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Open-source AI firm Reflection AI is partnering with the Department of Energy to help power the Genesis Mission, a federal scientific research initiative, per an announcement shared exclusively with Axios.
Why it matters: The partnership is a big advancement for a company that's trying to get the U.S. to embrace open-source models.
Driving the news: Reflection AI will serve as the AI model provider at the U.S. National Labs.
- The company is aiming to be the premier U.S. AI lab for the most advanced open-weight models, where the trained parameters are available to the public.
- The Genesis Mission is a Department of Energy initiative launched last year to accelerate scientific research through quantum computing and AI.
What they're saying: "You can't do scientific discovery on a closed model. It would be like doing rocket science, but you only get to look at the rocket, as opposed to taking it apart and examining the engine," Reflection AI CEO Misha Laskin told Axios.
- "The reason this is the open model base of the Genesis mission is because scientists need full access to the model in order to be able to understand and customize it."
- He added: "It's personal for me because I'm an immigrant to this country, and I moved here because my parents got jobs in a national lab."
The big picture: The U.S. government has contracted with many closed-model AI companies, such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Other open-model companies like Mistral have teamed up with governments around the world, including France and Singapore.
- Meta has made its Llama open-source models available to federal agencies under a GSA partnership.
What's inside: Reflection will provide DOE with AI models it can customize for its data, and Reflection will use DOE's compute as it is deployed across Genesis Mission research projects.
- Reflection and the DOE may collaborate in other ways, too, per the announcement. The firm will be the "foundational intelligence layer" to DOE's 17 national laboratories.
Reflection recently signed a deal with the Pentagon alongside other tech firms for use of its AI in classified environments. It also has a partnership with South Korea to build a "sovereign AI cloud."
- Reflection has not yet issued a public frontier open-weight model, but plans to do so later this year, Laskin said.
