Reflection AI launches Beam open-weight model rival

Brooklyn-based Reflection AI has unveiled Beam, its first open-weight frontier model. The 501-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model was pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens and features a 1 million token context window. Reflection claims Beam matches Chinese open models like Z.ai's GLM-5.2 on advanced reasoning benchmarks while using 3-4x less inference compute, though these claims are unverified. Founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers, Reflection has raised roughly $4.7 billion from backers including Nvidia and Sequoia. The company is targeting enterprises and sovereign nations with an AI factory concept, and plans to release Beam's weights this month.