Nvidia-backed Reflection AI challenges Chinese dominance in open-weight models
An Nvidia-backed US start-up has unveiled an open-weight model to challenge China’s dominance in freely available artificial intelligence, releasing a system that early third-party testing suggests could be one of the most token-efficient open models in its class. Reflection AI on Monday debuted Beam, its first open-weight model built for coding, reasoning and agentic tasks. The US firm said Beam…
Nvidia-backed US startup Reflection AI has unveiled an open-weight model named Beam, challenging China's dominance in freely available artificial intelligence. Beam, intended for coding, reasoning, and agentic tasks, shows early promise as one of the most token-efficient open models in its class. Built using a "mixture of experts" approach, Beam activates only 23 billion parameters per task out of a total of 501 billion, significantly reducing the compute demands compared to Z.ai's GLM-5.2 and Alibaba Group Holding's Qwen3.8-Max.
While official benchmarks are pending, early indicators suggest Beam will be highly token-efficient. Founded by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, Reflection AI has raised over $4 billion and secured partnerships with the Pentagon and US Department of Energy. The startup aims to offer Western alternatives to Chinese open-weight models, with Beam currently available to a limited group of early users and expected to be released with fine-tuning tools later this month.
Written by urgent.news from SCMP Tech's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
