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 was “competitive” with GLM-5.2 from Z.ai – also known as Zhipu AI – and was “approaching” Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen3.8-Max on coding and agentic workflows, although Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 remained ahead in “raw capability”. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
