Reflection unveils Beam, open-weight AI model rivaling Chinese models at lower cost
reflection ai debuts beam, a 501b-parameter open-weight model that matches chinese models on reasoning benchmarks at lower compute cost, targeting enterprises and sovereign nations.
reflection ai, a two-year-old startup founded by former google deepmind researchers, has unveiled beam, its first frontier open-weight ai model. beam claims to match the performance of leading chinese open models, such as z.ai's glm 5.2, on advanced reasoning benchmarks at 'a fraction of the token cost and inference time compute' of rivals. the model has 501 billion parameters with 23 billion active parameters, was pre-trained on 23.8 trillion tokens, and has a 1 million token context window. reflection says beam scores on par with z.ai's glm-5.2 and outperforms leading western open models while using '3-4x less inference compute.' the startup is targeting enterprises, the public sector, and developers with beam, and aims to build 'ai factories' that let institutions create customized, local ai systems.