Reflection AI, a U.S. startup backed by Nvidia, has released its first model, named Beam, positioning it as an American competitor to Chinese-led open-weight AI models. The company, which has raised over $4 billion since its 2024 launch and is valued at $25 billion, claims Beam excels at coding and agentic tasks while being highly efficient.
Beam is a 501-billion parameter sparse Mixture-of-Experts model designed to be customized and run on users' own hardware. Reflection AI asserts that early tests show Beam's performance is competitive with leading open models from Chinese labs, but uses significantly less computing power for inference. The release is seen as strategically important for the U.S. in the AI race with China, where open-weight models have been gaining significant traction.