AI news · Reflection AI · models
Reflection releases Beam’s weights under an open licence
The 501-billion-parameter model for long-context reasoning and agents is now free to download, adapt and use commercially.
Anyone can now download Reflection AI’s first model. On Friday 16 October 2026 the US lab put Beam’s weights, the learned numbers that make up the model, on Hugging Face, Hugging Face’s launch post shows. They come under the Apache 2.0 licence, which allows changes and commercial use. Reflection had presented Beam the week before, SiliconANGLE notes.
Beam is big but frugal. It holds 501 billion of those learned numbers, called parameters, with 256 smaller expert networks in most of its layers. Only about 23 billion parameters work on each token (a word or part of one). So it replies about as fast as a far smaller model, Hugging Face explains. It reads up to 1 million tokens at once and targets reasoning and agentic work.
Running it still takes serious hardware. Hugging Face suggests four Nvidia B200 chips for comfortable use.
The release includes recipes for further training and a small drafter model that speeds up replies, SiliconANGLE reports. Builders can win too: Reflection puts up $10,000 in Hugging Face credits for standout Beam projects, the launch post says.
Companies that want a large model on their own servers, with their data kept in-house, have one more option to price.
Earlier on this story: Reflection unveils Beam, a 501B open-weight model
Sources
- Hugging Face: Welcome Beam: a 501B open model you can own, customize, and scale. Checked
- SiliconANGLE: Reflection AI open-sources Beam’s weights, post-training recipes. Checked
More AI news from
- India says lab AI agents read firms’ confidential files
- China drafts export curbs on 23 AI technologies
- Tim Cook says China has approved Apple Intelligence
- Claude cracks the 25-year riddle of NIST’s curve seeds
- Campaigns spend $137 million on AI ads, most with no label
- Anthropic says juniors are a shrinking share of its tech hires
- Trump’s Super Intelligence Force orders a report on AI risks
- Microsoft finishes MAI-Base-2, a 2.8 trillion parameter model
- Apple tightens App Store rules on AI nudify apps