Nvidia-backed Reflection AI unveils Beam, its first open-weight model, which it says rivals GLM-5.2 on reasoning with far less inference compute. Weights are due this month.
Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost
TE TechCrunch 
Key points
- Reflection AI is officially unveiling Beam, its first frontier, open-weight AI model.
- The two-year-old, Brooklyn-based startup claims Beam matches the performance of leading Chinese open models on advanced reasoning benchmarks at dramatically lower costs, a claim that could heat up the race to build a Western answer to DeepSeek, Qwen, and Z.ai.
- Reflection’s performance claims haven’t been independently verified, but on advanced reasoning benchmarks, the company says Beam scores on par with Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and outperforms today’s leading Western open models while using “3-4x less inference compute.”
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- TechCrunch Reflection debuts Beam, an open-weight AI model to rival Chinese models at lower compute cost (this story)
