US startup Reflection AI, founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers, has unveiled Beam, an open-weight AI model for coding and AI agent tasks.

The company describes Beam as a 501-billion-parameter model.

Reflection said Beam scored comparably with Z.AI’s GLM-5.2 on advanced reasoning benchmarks and plans to publish more technical details later this month.

Z.AI, a China-based AI company, markets a chatbot and agent powered by GLM-5.3-Flash.

It describes GLM-5.2 as built for long-horizon tasks.

Chinese AI developers including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI have gained ground with cheaper, customizable open models, while OpenAI and Anthropic have mainly focused on proprietary products.

Reflection emerged from stealth last year and is backed by Nvidia.

The startup had reportedly held talks to raise US$2.5 billion at a US$25 billion valuation.

🔗 Source: Bloomberg