Nvidia-backed Reflection AI on Monday unveiled Beam, its first open-weight model, positioning a New York startup against Chinese labs that have led the open-model race, Fortune and Semafor reported.
Beam is a sparse mixture-of-experts system with 501 billion total parameters and 23 billion active, built for coding, reasoning, and agentic workloads, Reflection said in a company post. The firm plans to release the weights under an Apache 2.0 license later this month, with a technical report and model card, after early-access signups and final red-teaming. Sources likewise described Beam as a 501-billion-parameter model trained from scratch under Apache 2.0.
Reflection says company tests put Beam near Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and approaching Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8-Max on coding and agentic tasks. CEO Misha Laskin told Semafor the model is particularly strong at those workloads and needs three to four times less computing power to reason than comparable open models. Fortune quoted Reflection saying Beam is three to four times more efficient than rival Western open models.
The company is pitching Beam as a “workhorse” for enterprises, the public sector, and developers that want to run and customize models themselves. Laskin told Semafor that businesses and governments building sovereign AI systems that will not or cannot rely on Chinese models “don’t really have very good options today.”
Reflection was founded in March 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, now CEO and president/CTO, Fortune reported. The Nvidia-backed firm carries a $25 billion valuation (Laskin to CNBC in April, per Fortune; Semafor said the latest round closed in June at a $25 billion pre-money valuation, with Sequoia and Citigroup among investors). Fortune also noted a May partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of War, plus large SpaceX and Nebius compute deals.
Reflection said it is already training a larger follow-on model. Semafor reported Laskin expects the next release to be “much more” powerful. Independent third-party benchmarks were not yet public at unveil.
Sources
- https://fortune.com/2026/10/05/reflection-ai-unveils-beam-a-new-us-based-open-source-model-to-compete-with-china/
- https://www.semafor.com/article/10/05/2026/reflection-ai-unveils-an-open-source-answer-to-chinese-labs
- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-05/nvidia-backed-reflection-unveils-open-ai-model-taking-on-china
- https://www.ft.com/content/353be303-3271-43f0-aefb-69b6ed7a0a6f
- https://reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam
- https://sources.news/p/reflection-founders-open-weight-beam-release