Reflection AI, founded by ex-DeepMind researchers, releases Beam—an open-source model rivaling Chinese AI labs like Z.ai and Alibaba—to give Western companies and governments a sovereign alternative that uses less computing power for coding and agentic tasks.

Reflection AI unveils an open-source Western answer to Chinese labs

Reflection AI, the startup billing itself as America’s answer to open-source Chinese AI, is releasing its first model, called Beam.The company, founded in 2024 by former DeepMind researchers, is positioning Beam as a “workhorse” that performs better than other Western open models. The model is particularly strong at coding and agentic tasks, cofounder and CEO Misha Laskin told Semafor. It also needs three to four times less computing power to reason through a problem than comparable open models,...