Nvidia Bet on Reflection for Open-Source AI. Now the Startup Is Playing Catch-Up.

Last August, a co-founder of Reflection AI flew to California to meet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The fledgling startup had been making an AI coding tool, but the tech magnate encouraged him to go with a new plan, said someone familiar with the meeting, for something that at the time seemed more novel: developing open-source AI models that developers can download and modify.

With Huang’s backing and $800 million in initial investment from Nvidia, Reflection CEO Misha Laskin and his co-founder and technology chief, Ioannis Antonoglou, positioned their company as America’s champion in a contest with Chinese firms developing open-source AI. That vision has drawn billions of dollars of capital from other investors, including JPMorgan Chase, Sequoia Capital and 1789 Capital—a venture firm at which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner—and led to its inclusion by the Pentagon in a group of AI suppliers along with seven of the biggest tech firms in America.

But as interest in open-source AI crescendos nearly a year after the meeting with Huang, Reflection has yet to actually release its AI model—and it is falling further behind a growing list of rivals.