Reflection AI Unveils Beam, Its First Open-Weight Model
The Nvidia-backed startup debuted a 501-billion-parameter model it says rivals China’s best open-weight systems on coding and agentic tasks.
Reflection AI unveiled its first model on Monday, a system called Beam designed to take on the Chinese open-weight models that now dominate that part of the artificial intelligence market. The startup is backed by Nvidia and was founded two years ago by former Google DeepMind researchers.
Beam contains 501 billion parameters in total, Reflection said, but activates only 23 billion of them for any given task. Using part of the network for each task is meant to make the model faster and cheaper to run. The company said its tests put Beam on par with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2, an open model built in Beijing, on coding and agentic tasks — and closing in on Qwen3.8-Max.
The company’s founders have serious credentials in the field. Misha Laskin, Reflection’s chief executive, led reward modeling for Gemini at Google DeepMind. Ioannis Antonoglou, the chief technology officer, helped create AlphaGo and AlphaZero, and later led Gemini’s reinforcement learning from human feedback work.
The timing reflects real pressure on American firms. Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek and Moonshot’s Kimi are cheaper, easy to customize, and can generate code nearly as well as leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Reflection is betting that businesses and governments want an American-built alternative they can inspect, adapt, and run themselves.
Reflection said Beam will carry an Apache 2.0 license, meaning developers can modify it and build commercial products on it without special restrictions. Laskin has framed the stakes in plain terms: closed models are the equivalent of renting an apartment, he said, and an ownership market for AI is starting to form.
The startup has been positioning Beam as a workhorse for enterprises and governments. In May, Reflection agreed to supply its models to the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of War. It also signed a computing deal with SpaceX earlier this year for access to the company’s Colossus 2 data center. The benchmark scores are Reflection’s own for now — independent testing will decide whether the claims hold up in real use.
