Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost

Reflection AI has officially unveiled Beam, its first frontier open-weight AI model. The two-year-old Brooklyn-based startup claims Beam matches the performance of leading Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks at dramatically lower costs, a claim that has not been independently verified.

The company 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 what it calls "a fraction of the token cost and inference time compute" of rivals. Beam has 501 billion parameters with 23 billion active parameters, was pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens, and has a 1 million token context window. For comparison, Z.ai's GLM-5.2 has roughly 744 billion total parameters with 40 billion active. Reflection says Beam scores on par with GLM-5.2 and outperforms today's leading Western open models while using "3-4x less inference compute," and calls it a "workhorse model" for enterprises, the public sector, and developers.

The announcement confirms reporting from Axios over the weekend that a launch was close. Reflection is positioning itself against closed labs like Anthropic and OpenAI, against Chinese open models, and against Western players like Mistral, Meta, and Cohere. Its benchmarks show Beam outscoring Inkling, the open model from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released in July, on four coding tests where both report results; Inkling is multimodal while Beam is text-only.

Founded in 2024 by two former Google DeepMind researchers, Reflection has raised roughly $4.7 billion from backers including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital, and Lightspeed Venture Partners, per PitchBook, and its last round valued it at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. This summer it signed deals collectively worth more than $7 billion with SpaceX and Nebius for access to Nvidia's GB300 chips through 2029.

Reflection aims Beam and future models at enterprises and sovereign nations through "AI factories" that let institutions train Reflection's models on their own proprietary data. It has begun testing a sovereign AI factory partnership with Shinsegae Group in South Korea. Reflection says it will release Beam's weights and full technical details this month, with distribution through hyperscalers and neoclouds and integrations across open source libraries at launch.

Reflection did not respond in time to TechCrunch's requests for more information.