US startup Reflection AI releases its first open model, Beam — a Western alternative to Chinese ones
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Publication time restored from the build log. . Updated: .
Companies and governments that do not want to or cannot use Chinese models now have an open Western option.
The company, founded in 2024 by DeepMind alumni, released Beam, an open-weights text model with 501 billion parameters (23 billion active) and a 1 million-token context. According to the company, on reasoning benchmarks it is on par with GLM-5.2 from China's Z.ai and outperforms leading Western open models while using three to four times less compute. Reflection is aiming the model at companies and governments that want to train SI on their own data in-house.