Reflection’s Beam trails top open models on coding tests but claims lower inference compute

Reflection AI has built Beam, a 501-billion-parameter open-weight model for coding and agent tasks, and plans to publish the weights under an Apache 2.0 license later this month. Open-weight means developers can download the trained model and run it on their own hardware. Beam uses a mixture-of-experts design, so 23 billion of its parameters fire for any given token, which keeps the cost of each answer down.