Nvidia-backed Reflection AI unveils Beam, a 501B-parameter open-weight model claiming to rival Chinese models at lower compute
RebeccaBellan · x · 2026-10-06
Reflection AI, a two-year-old Brooklyn startup backed by Nvidia, has officially unveiled Beam, its first frontier open-weight model positioned as a Western answer to DeepSeek, Qwen, and Z.ai.
Key details:
- Architecture: text-only mixture-of-experts with 501B total parameters and 23B active parameters, pre-trained on 23.8 trillion tokens with a 1M-token context window
- Training: high-compute reinforcement learning targeting reasoning, coding, and agentic tasks
- Claim: matches leading Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks "at a fraction of the token cost and inference-time compute"
- Weights are due to be released this month
The launch confirms earlier Axios reporting and could heat up the race to build Western rivals to Chinese open models.
Related event: Reflection AI Debuts Beam, a 501B-Parameter Open-Weight Model(20 posts)→
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