Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA)–backed Reflection AI is stepping deeper into the global AI race with Beam, its first open-weight model designed to compete with lower-cost Chinese systems such as DeepSeek and Kimi in coding and agentic tasks.
Reflection AI Launches New Beam Model
The startup said Beam delivers performance comparable to Chinese AI firm Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and is approaching the capabilities of Qwen3.8-Max in coding and agentic workloads.
Beam has 501 billion parameters, which are the variables that help an AI model process information. However, it activates only about 23 billion parameters for each task, potentially delivering large-model capabilities while using less computing power.
That compares with GLM-5.2, which has roughly 744 billion total parameters and activates about 40 billion at a time.
Beam’s Safety and Alignment
Reflection AI said it trained a separate safety model using supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, then combined it with a large-scale RL model through multi-teacher distillation.
In a blog post, the company said, "We will publish the results of our safety evaluations in our model technical report and will open-source safety evaluations we developed and used internally to create a shared, inspectable standard that the open ecosystem can test against and contribute to."
Beam Targets China’s Low-Cost AI Models
Reflection’s launch comes as U.S. technology companies face growing competition from Chinese open-weight models that offer lower costs, greater customization and increasingly strong coding capabilities.
Open-weight models allow developers to access and modify a model’s trained weights, giving them more flexibility than closed systems that can only be accessed through a company’s platform.
Nvidia-Backed Startup Expands Computing Capacity
Founded in 2024 by former DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, Reflection develops AI tools aimed at automating software development.
The company also secured a computing-capacity agreement with Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (NASDAQ:SPCX) earlier this year, giving it access to additional resources at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center.
Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.
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