frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model

https://reflection.ai/blog/introducing-beam
78•Philpax•47m ago

Comments

htrp•44m ago
> Beam is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 501 billion total parameters, 23 billion active, built for coding, reasoning, and agentic workloads.

> Beam’s capabilities come from major investments in both pretraining and reinforcement learning (RL). We pretrained the model on 23.8 trillion diverse, curated, high-quality tokens from the web and proprietary licensed datasets, matching or outperforming available similar-sized open base models. In parallel, we developed the algorithms, training environments, and infrastructure needed to sustain high-compute RL at exceptional scale. Our high-compute RL run generated over 100 million rollouts on 10.5K NVIDIA GB300 GPUs over 4 weeks of training.

Early access, no weights no tech details, just a sign up here for info

zelphirkalt•24m ago
And also a "proprietary data set" hahaha... Probably just means they don't want to show it, and it is data, that either they shouldn't have, or that there is nothing special about their training data and it is just meant to sound like there is some secret ingredient, while there is none.
wronglebowski•22m ago
I'm all for more open models, but talk is cheap and this is a rather pointless announcement without anything backing it up. Publish your weights and HF repo or shut up IMO.
wg0•34m ago
Suppose I inherited a data center spanning several hundred acres full of GPUs and free electricity.

Where do I get the data?

I mean, this many models. They have to start somewhere.

Hamuko•33m ago
Get data from Claude. That's what the Chinese (allegedly) do.
altcognito•29m ago
If you ask a model, they will generally tell you where to get data. Modern frontier models have the large advantage of having tens if not hundreds of millions of users providing use cases to train against to improve their responses.
petu•20m ago
I guess public datasets on HuggingFace and some shadow libraries content is enough to start.

e.g. fineweb dataset is 50TB https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb

lucrbvi•16m ago
There are a lot of open-research on pre-training, post-training and RL data mixtures and sourcing.

I recommend checking papers from Datalogy, Nvidia Nemotron, Ai2 (Ollmo, Tulu, ...) and the recent model from Aleph Alpha if you want to learn more.

Ariarule•33m ago
Always glad to see more open-weight models, but this caption on the 2nd demo image had me do a double-take: "Land or Water Generalization Experiment: We recreated the viral X puzzle by asking Beam to create a fixed 180×90 grid for longitudes -179° to 179° and latitudes -89° to 89°, with 16,200 points. This puzzle is a few days old, so could not appear in the training data, thus testing the model’s generalization. Beam gets 95.5% coverage right, putting us between Opus 5 (92.5%) and Fable 5 (97.8%), which shows how well it generalizes to novel new tasks."

Oof, no, this "puzzle is a few days old" is incorrect even if it's a social media trend just recently. Asking a model to generate a world map in this way is _at least_ from August 2025 as it appeared on LessWrong at that time: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xwdRzJxyqFqgXTWbH/how-does-a...

extr•15m ago
Yeah I remember when the original post about this came out. Def not recent. Though I think their point survives in that they didn't exactly RL on this.
sharktheone•28m ago
Am I the only one who thought of the BEAM VM after the first word of thee title?
pstuart•16m ago
nopes
drubs•22m ago
I remember being in the room with pretraining day 1 to help monitor the training job launch. Watching this model train from day 1 has been an amazing experience!
aeetes•15m ago
the performance chart puts the better open source models behind the fold making it seem like it outperforms them... but it doesn't! all for open source models but this announcement is misleading
brumbelow•7m ago
Yes. All the link made me realize is that I should checkout Deepseek 4.1 flash
keeganpoppen•15m ago
very curious to see more about what kinds of hardware you can run this on and the perf. characteristics… on the face of it, it seems like optimizing for inference speed might(?) be good for running on smaller hardware, but i suppose it could be the other way around and it is actually much resource-hungrier for the number of parameters, etc. …
NorwegianDude•14m ago
Bigger and still worse than existing free Chinese models that are smaller? Open weight models are nice, but at this point it seems western models are very far behind Chinese ones, despite Chinese companies publishing a lot of their findings. I hope we get more open models and more providers, as being stuck with a model from China or US with no competition is risky.

Google does do a great job with Gemma models. It's one of the few language models actually good at language. OpenAI's top closed models can't even write norwegian correctly.

onlyrealcuzzo•14m ago
This appears to be larger than DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, more expensive to run, and worse on every measured metric.

Am I missing something?

zopper•4m ago
What a disappointing release. Open model that is not yet open or widely accessible via API. Primarily comparing to non-SOTA models like Inkling and GLM 5.2. Included comparison to GLM 5.3 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash in the table, but not in the charts (I assume they would make them look bad). Also no results from AA Index or Arena.

First Steps into Memory Management in Python

https://tech.daniellbastos.com.br/posts/python-memory-management/
1•shellpipe•2m ago•0 comments

Are right‑brained people more creative? Here's what science tells us

https://www.rnz.co.nz/life/wellbeing/are-right-brained-people-really-more-creative-here-s-what-th...
3•billybuckwheat•3m ago•0 comments

François Chollet: "OpenAI basically set back progress to AGI by 5 to 10 years"

https://www.techradar.com/pro/quote-of-the-day-by-arc-prize-co-founder-francois-chollet-openai-ba...
1•theanonymousone•5m ago•0 comments

Our digital privacy is being aggressively disbanded this week

2•Steaglsz•5m ago•0 comments

Agent-topics: subdivide big project scopes for more focused chats

https://github.com/codechriscode/agent-topics
1•codechriscode•8m ago•0 comments

Miquel's Pivot Theorem

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/10/03/miquels-pivot-theorem/
1•ibobev•10m ago•0 comments

Golang tool to check SPF, DKIM, TLSA, and TLS settings for mailservers

https://git.sig-io.nl/Sig-IO/mailcheck
1•sigio•11m ago•1 comments

TV Poetry

https://tvsimulator.com/poems/intro/
1•johnjreiser•13m ago•1 comments

Ghost.ai's new personal AI computer, Nvidia RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell

https://twitter.com/zainmfj/status/2107146556176798081
1•mccauley•13m ago•0 comments

Pi Durable: What It Is and Why It Matters for Agent Apps

https://www.mindstudio.ai/blog/pi-durable-long-running-agents
1•anavid7•13m ago•0 comments

QBasic in the Browser

https://www.vahidyousefzadeh.com/qbasic
1•vahidce•14m ago•1 comments

Anthropic removes support for local Claude Cowork sessions

https://support.claude.com/en/articles/15520349-use-claude-cowork-on-web-desktop-and-mobile
3•Xtrah•14m ago•0 comments

Three AI models, same prompt, before and after a testing tool

https://buoy.gg/blog/ai-models-before-and-after-buoy
1•lovesworking•14m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Meanwhile Map – what else was happening in the world at the same time

https://meanwhilemap.com/
2•29b•15m ago•1 comments

Play YouTube Videos in Claude Code

https://twitter.com/GNUmanth/status/2107194414582137113
1•init0•16m ago•0 comments

New saber-toothed predator from Argentina shows its lineage survived longer

https://phys.org/news/2026-10-saber-toothed-predator-argentina-lineage.html
1•saikatsg•17m ago•0 comments

A conservation success story for New Zealand's heaviest insect

https://phys.org/news/2026-10-success-story-zealand-heaviest-insect.html
3•saikatsg•18m ago•0 comments

Miquel's Pentagon Theorem

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/10/04/miquels-pentagon-theorem/
1•ibobev•18m ago•0 comments

The End of Software Secrecy

https://nitter.space/esrtweet/status/2106983467141509385#m
1•daoboy•18m ago•0 comments

AI nonprofit will spend $10M on journalism

https://www.semafor.com/article/10/04/2026/ai-nonprofit-will-spend-10-million-on-journalism
1•SLHamlet•19m ago•1 comments

Unroll a loop, make shader 10x faster

https://aras-p.info/blog/2026/10/05/Unroll-a-loop-make-shader-10x-faster/
1•ibobev•19m ago•0 comments

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

https://www.semafor.com/article/10/05/2026/reflection-ai-unveils-an-open-source-answer-to-chinese...
1•CoryOndrejka•21m ago•1 comments

The Physicist Revolutionizing Physics with AI [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQypVVv1u1o
2•amichail•22m ago•0 comments

AI tool can reconstruct what you're looking at from a brain scan

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/01/1145588/ai-mind-reading-reconstructs-what-youre-looki...
2•bookofjoe•23m ago•0 comments

Cloud and Local, One System

https://www.forjal.com/manifesto
1•Lucasllfs•23m ago•0 comments

Text classifiers in 51 languages that run on your CPU

https://playground.jeffyclassify.com/#multilingual
1•nico•24m ago•1 comments

The API Grand Prix Fabula About Macropay-Solutions PHP Ecosystem

https://medium.com/@marius-ciclistu/list/the-api-grand-prix-486dc1becb36
1•marius-ciclistu•24m ago•0 comments

Mineral Water Atlas of the World

https://mineralwaters.geo.uu.nl/world.php
1•coinfused•28m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Smolvm – MicroVMs with CRIU Functionality

https://smolmachines.com/engineering/branching-and-checkpoint-lineage
1•binsquare•29m ago•0 comments

Udon – Remote management for macOS home servers

https://udon.sh
1•oliexe•29m ago•0 comments