Reflection debuts Beam, a open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost
Reflection AI is officially unveiling Beam, its first frontier, open-weight AI model. The two-year-old startup claims Beam matches the performance of leading Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks at dramatically lower costs, a claim that could heat up the race to build a Western answer to DeepSeek, Qwen, and Z.ai.
Reflection’s announcement confirms reporting from Axios over the weekend that the startup was close to a launch. The company shared new details in a lengthy blog post Monday, which described Beam as a text-only mixture-of-experts model trained on high-compute reinforcement learning to be effective at reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks at “a fraction of the token cost and inference time compute” of rivals.
Beam is a 501-billion-parameter model with 23 billion active parameters. It was pre-trained on 23.8 trillion tokens and has a 1 million token context window. To compare, Z.ai’s GLM 5.2 has roughly 744 billion total...
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