Reflection AI has unveiled Beam, its first frontier open-weight AI model, claiming it matches top Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks while using far less computing power. The Brooklyn-based startup, founded two years ago, said the text-only model is built for reasoning, coding and agentic tasks at a fraction of the token cost and inference time of its rivals. The announcement confirmed Axios reporting from the weekend that a launch was near.
Beam carries 501 billion total parameters with 23 billion active, was pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens and offers a 1 million token context window. By comparison, Z.ai's GLM-5.2 has roughly 744 billion total parameters with 40 billion active. Reflection said Beam scores on par with GLM-5.2 on advanced reasoning tests and beats leading Western open models while using three to four times less inference compute, though the claims have not been independently verified.
Reflection is pitching Beam as a workhorse model for enterprises, the public sector and developers, putting it in competition with closed labs Anthropic and OpenAI as well as open-model players including Mistral, Meta, Cohere and Chinese developers. Its most direct U.S. rival may be Inkling, the open model from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab released in July. Reflection's benchmarks show Beam outperforming Inkling on four coding tests where both report results, but Inkling handles multiple formats while Beam is text-only.
The company has raised roughly $4.7 billion from backers including Nvidia, Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, according to PitchBook, and its last round valued it at a $25 billion pre-money valuation. This summer it signed deals worth more than $7 billion combined with SpaceX and Nebius to secure access to Nvidia's GB300 chips through 2029.
Reflection's pitch centers on "AI factories," systems that let institutions train its models on their own proprietary data to build customized local AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, whose company backs Reflection, has long pushed the AI factory concept and a stronger open AI ecosystem. Axios reported hedge funds and trading firms are among those interested, and Reflection has begun testing a sovereign AI factory partnership with South Korea's Shinsegae Group.
Reflection said it will release Beam's weights and full technical details this month, distributed through hyperscalers and neoclouds with integrations across open source libraries at launch. The company did not respond to requests for more information in time.
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