Reflection debuts Beam, a open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost
Reflection AI unveiled Beam, a 501B open-weight model claiming Chinese-model reasoning at much lower cost.
Reflection AI unveiled Beam, a text-only open-weight mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion parameters and 23 billion active, pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens with a 1 million-token context window. The company says Beam matches Z.ai's GLM-5.2 on advanced reasoning benchmarks and beats leading Western open models while using 3-4x less inference compute; those claims are not independently verified. Weights are slated for release this month via hyperscalers, neoclouds, and open-source libraries. Founded by former Google DeepMind researchers, Reflection has raised about $4.7 billion and signed more than $7 billion in compute deals with SpaceX and Nebius.