What is Beam? The US AI model being called the 'DeepSeek of the West'

A New York AI startup founded by two former Google DeepMind researchers has released its first major model — and is pitching it as a homegrown answer to China's increasingly powerful open AI systems.

That is an alternative to using models from companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic, which are generally accessed via their own Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Reflection says Beam, a text-only model, has 501 billion total parameters, but activates only 23 billion at a time — a design intended to make it cheaper and faster to operate. The model can handle coding, multi-step reasoning, and other agentic work.

"The only way to own intelligence is, by definition, if it's open — because if it's open, you can run it on your stuff, you can own it, you can control it, you can customize it," Laskin, the CEO, said in a podcast released on Monday.

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The startup has raised billions of dollars and is backed by investors including Nvidia, Sequoia, and Citigroup. In June, it confirmed a funding round at a $25 billion pre-money valuation.

Reflection said Beam is competitive with Z.ai's GLM-5.2 on coding and agentic tasks, and is approaching Alibaba's Qwen 3.8-Max. It said that Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 remains ahead on raw capability.

The startup is pitching itself on efficiency. It said Beam can achieve results comparable to GLM-5.2 on advanced reasoning benchmarks while using three to four times less inference compute — the processing required for a model to answer a prompt.

Beam's launch is being welcomed as a potentially important US response to China's open-model lead. It arrives in a crowded field that includes open models from Meta, Mistral, Nvidia, and Thinking Machines Lab.

Beam also faces obvious competition from powerful models released in China by companies including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Z.ai, and Moonshot AI.

On Monday, Nvidia AI's official X account congratulated the company on the launch. Investors, including Deedy Das and Shaun Maguire, also expressed their enthusiasm for the launch on X.