Partnering with Reflection: Toward Superintelligence, with Autonomous Coding

• Sequoia backs Reflection AI, founded by two DeepMind principals.
  • Ioannis Antonoglou: led AlphaGo, AlphaZero, MuZero, Gemini post-training.
  • Misha Laskin: led reward model development at DeepMind.
• Thesis: autonomous coding is the critical path to superintelligence.
• Real-world evals over benchmarks — core design philosophy.
• Agents embed in codebases; handle scoped, high-leverage tasks.
  • Refactoring legacy code, generating tests, memory optimization.
  • Security vulnerability detection.
• Team drawn from Deep Q Networks, AlphaGo, PaLM, CharacterAI, ChatGPT, Gemini.
• Move 37 framing: superhuman moves emerge from non-human reasoning.
  • AlphaGo’s Move 37 was the lodestar — unexpected, optimal, alien.

Stephanie Zhan and Charlie Curnin — Sequoia Capital partners · 2025-03-07 · Read on sequoiacap.com