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

Reflection AI is a New York-based AI lab. kolderal/Getty Images Reflection AI's first model is here. Beam is a text-based model designed for coding and reasoning tasks. Beam is being seen as a competitive Western alternative to open weight models. 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. Reflection AI on Monday unveiled Beam, an "open-weight" model designed for coding, reasoning, and AI-agent tasks. The company says it rivals some of China's leading open models while using far less computing power. Here's what to know. What is Beam? Beam is Reflection AI's first frontier open-weight model. Open-weight means developers can download the model's parameters, run them on their own hardware, and modify or fine-tune them for specific use cases.