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

Reflection AI has launched Beam, an open-weight AI model designed to compete with leading Chinese models like DeepSeek, Qwen, and Z.ai. Beam is a 501-billion-parameter model with 23 billion active parameters, pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens, and features a 1 million token context window. The Brooklyn-based startup claims Beam matches the performance of these Chinese models on advanced reasoning benchmarks at significantly lower compute costs, intensifying the race for Western AI alternatives.