Misha Laskin, Reflection.ai — From Physics to SuperIntelligence

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.

https://x.com/MishaLaskin

Steve and Misha discuss:

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (00:47) - 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

Music used with permission from Blade Runner Blues Livestream improvisation by State Azure.

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Steve Hsu is Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering at Michigan State University. Previously, he was Senior Vice President for Research and Innovation at MSU and Director of the Institute of Theoretical Science at the University of Oregon. Hsu is a startup founder (SuperFocus.ai, SafeWeb, Genomic Prediction, Othram) and advisor to venture capital and other investment firms. He was educated at Caltech and Berkeley, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and has held faculty positions at Yale, the University of Oregon, and MSU.

Please send any questions or suggestions to manifold1podcast@gmail.com or Steve on X @hsu_steve.