Reflection AI unveils 501B-parameter open-weights model Beam

It finally happened America has entered the frontier open weights model competition. We aren't rolling over to China Reflection announced Beam, a 501B parameter open weights model that is comparable to GLM 5.2, Qwen 3.8, and Opus 4.8 Yes, Opus 4.8 on your desk You will need a decent sized machine for this. Probably the Mac Studio 512gb But if you listened to me back in January when I warned you days like today were going to come, then you're all set I stand by Opus 4.5 being the most important model release in history. We will now have a model BETTER than that on our desks If you haven't gotten into local AI yet, it's officially time to do it Take any computer you have, talk to an AI agent, ask which models you can run Never been more important to just start

Reflection’s founders on building a DeepSeek of the West Reflection is soon releasing Beam, its first open-weight AI model, in a bid to become the DeepSeek of the West. Trained from scratch, Beam is designed for coding, reasoning, and AI agents. Reflection's benchmarks put it alongside the strongest open models, with substantially more efficient token economics. To mark Beam’s debut, I'm joined by Reflection's co-founders: CEO @MishaLaskin, who led reward modeling for Google’s Gemini, and CTO @real_ioannis, who helped create AlphaGo and AlphaZero before leading Gemini’s RLHF effort. Reflection has raised $4.6 billion from investors that include Nvidia, Sequoia, and Lightspeed. We discuss why Chinese labs pulled ahead in open AI models, how Reflection built Beam, and why the founders…

This rocks. Congrats to the whole team. I know a few folks at Reflection and they are the real deal

Reflection AI says Beam is its first model, pretrained in 4 weeks on 24T tokens and now at 500B parameters. The company says weights, a model card, and a tech report are coming later this month.