Reflection AI launches Beam to rival Chinese open models

Reflection AI released its first open-weight model, Beam, on October 5, positioning it as a "workhorse" for Western enterprises.

The model uses a sparse Mixture-of-Experts architecture with 501 billion total parameters and 23 billion active. CEO Misha Laskin stated that Beam excels in coding and agentic tasks, requiring three to four times less computing power for reasoning than comparable open models.

Official benchmarks indicate Beam's performance is comparable to China's Z.ai GLM-5.2 and approaching Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max. The launch targets businesses and governments seeking sovereign AI options without relying on Chinese infrastructure.

The model is currently undergoing final red-teaming and evaluations, with weights and technical reports scheduled for release later this month.