Reflection AI announced Beam on October 5, its first open-weight model. The company says Beam scores like Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 on hard reasoning tests while using 3 to 4 times less computing to run. The weights, under the Apache 2.0 licence, are due later this month; for now there is only an early-access list.
New to this? Read it in simple words
- Reflection AI, a US start-up, announced its first AI model, called Beam.
- Anyone will be able to download and use it for free, later this month.
- The company says it needs much less computing than a similar Chinese model.
- Nobody outside the company has tested these claims yet.
- Open-weight model
- An AI model whose trained numbers anyone can download and run.
- Parameter
- One of the many numbers inside an AI model that it learns in training.
- Mixture of experts
- A model design that uses only some of its parts for each word, to save computing.
What Beam is
Beam is a mixture-of-experts model with 501 billion parameters, of which 23 billion are used for each word. Reflection says it trained it on 23.8 trillion tokens of text.
It reads only text, TechCrunch notes, and can handle up to 1 million tokens at once. Reflection says the model is “undergoing final red-teaming and evaluations”.
The weights, a technical report and a model card will come “later this month”, under the Apache 2.0 licence, Reflection says. That licence lets anyone use and change the model, including for business. Until then, people can only sign up for early access.
Terminal-Bench 2.1 scores from Reflection’s own announcement. No outside test yet.
Reflection’s claims
On advanced reasoning tests, Beam scores about the same as GLM-5.2 from the Chinese lab Z.ai “while using 3–4× less inference compute”, Reflection says. It also says Beam beats the leading Western open models.
Its own table is more mixed. On Terminal-Bench 2.1, a coding test, Reflection puts Beam at 80.1, against 81.0 for GLM-5.2, 86.6 for Qwen 3.8-Max and 88.3 for Kimi K3.
TechCrunch notes that no one outside the company has checked the efficiency claim. Artificial Analysis, which tests models independently, had no page for Beam on October 5.
A US answer to Chinese labs
Semafor calls Beam an open-source Western answer to Chinese labs, whose free models have been widely used by developers. Fortune describes it as a US-based open model built to compete with China.
Reflection has deals for computing power with SpaceX and Nebius worth more than $7 billion together, TechCrunch reports. They give it access to Nvidia GB300 chips through 2029.
Sources
Every fact in this story comes from the sources below. Open them to check our work.
- 1
- 2Research · October 5, 2026Reflection debuts Beam, a open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost TechCrunch
- 3Research · October 5, 2026Reflection AI unveils an open-source Western answer to Chinese labs Semafor
- 4Research · October 5, 2026Reflection AI unveils its first open model, Beam. Could it be the America’s best chance to compete with China? Fortune
Every score and the computing claim are Reflection’s own, and no outside test exists yet. The weights are not public, so nobody else can run the model.
Reflection promises a free open model later this month, but its performance and efficiency claims have no outside test yet. How we rate the mood