gshc2020.com

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.

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.

For now, Beam is in final safety testing and available through a waitlist. Reflection says it will release the model's weights, a technical report, and developer tools later this month.

Who is behind Beam?

Reflection was founded in 2024 by Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou, both former DeepMind researchers.

"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.

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.

How does Beam compare?

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.

How are tech and business leaders reacting?

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.

The Wall Street Journal reported in March that some investors had described Reflection as the "DeepSeek of the West." That comparison to DeepSeek has become the shorthand used in many X posts surrounding Beam's buzzy launch.

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.

Read next

Shubhangi Goel

You're currently following this author! Click to unsubscribe from email alerts.

Shuby is a senior reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau, where she writes about tech, with a focus on AI training and vibe-coding startups.She previously interned for Bloomberg News and CNBC. She studied communications and business at the National University of Singapore. In 2026, she won the Singapore Press Club Tech Journalism Award for her work on the hidden human cost of Meta's chatbot training program and an exposé on the black market for AI gig-work accounts.Have a tip? Contact her via email at [email protected] or on secure messaging app Signal at @shuby.85. We can keep sources anonymous. %!s()

Tuesday, 6 October, 19:45 BST

On the day he left Celtic after "18 years of ups and downs", Stephen Welsh posted a classy video on social media thanking the club for everything they'd done for him.

The footage featured a clip of him as a child in a Celtic jersey, playing indoor football with his mates with the number 18 and the name 'Lennon' on the back.

He smiles at the camera, held by his mum, and says he scored a goal. Welsh looks like the most contented kid on the planet. He's all grown up now at 26, hard-bitten by the reality of professional sport, but meet him at Lesser Hampden on Monday afternoon and that same smile is there. Maybe not the same boyish innocence but certainly the same love for what he's doing in the game.

From bit-part player at Celtic to a turning point season at Motherwell under his greatest influence Jens Berthel Askou to top of the Championship with Swansea, to three caps for his country. Impressive ones, too. Composed in his defending, accurate in his distribution, convincing in his partnership with fellow newcomer Luis Binks. Much has changed in his life.

Playing for Scotland is one thing but winning is quite another. How did it feel on Saturday night in Skopje when the last whistle sounded and his first win was put on the board?

"A bit of relief," he says. "We felt there could have been a lot more goals. Five or six and you probably couldn't have argued. To get your first win under your belt is a good feeling. Hopefully it pushes us on now."

The final act of this international window comes on Tuesday when Slovenia arrive at Hampden (19:45 BST), a chance to make up for last week's nightmarish experience against the Swiss, a game reduced to a non-event after Jack Hendry's early red card. Scotland battled away, but lost 3-0.

A "sore one", he says. "We had to suffer for a good 80-90 minutes," he explains. "That can take its toll mentally but we showed how strong we are going into North Macedonia.

"It will mean a lot for the squad, for the manager to come back home and put on a good performance and finish the camp with a win. You need to keep building on that. That's the standard that we want to set."

Welsh's story starts at Celtic, a product of their academy who turned down overtures from Udinese and Toulouse in his time. He wanted to stay and fight for his place but it was all stop-start.

After making his debut in the spring of 2020, Celtic kept signing centre-halves - Carl Starfelt and Liam Scales, Cameron Carter-Vickers and Yuki Kobayashi, Moritz Jenz and Maik Nawrocki, Gustaf Lagerbielke and Auston Trusty.

He played 70 games in total. It wasn't enough. "It's not easy but at a club like Celtic, they always want to improve, bring in more players because that keeps the competition," Welsh says. "It's football. You're not guaranteed to play even though you want to.

"For your boyhood club, to play every game, would have been the best-case scenario. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. I'm a big boy, I can accept that players are going to play in front of you. That's fair enough."

Challenging years, though. A time for mental fortitude.

"That's probably the thing that people don't see," he remarks. "What you need then is a good support group around you, good family, good friends. My agent was excellent for me. They just need to be there. That's the main thing, just be there.

"Psychologically, it can affect players but I don't think it affected me too much. I never took anything personally. That's just the way it goes. The best players, technically, probably don't [always] get to the top. It's the players that are mentally strong.

"Look at John [McGinn] and Robbo [Andy Robertson]. The mentality that they have. They're obviously fantastic footballers but it's the mental strength as well. To churn out performances every week, to turn up in good shape, to be ready to play tactically, technically, physically and mentally. That's the biggest challenge."

Podcast: Time for first Hampden win for Pocognoli's Scotland?

05/10/26

In an effort to get game time, Welsh signed a loan with Mechelen in Belgium before making the move of his life to Motherwell. He says he had one conversation with Berthel Askou and he was hooked.

"Going from Celtic to Motherwell doesn't look the most brilliant move in the world, but…" it made him. "How he coached me on and off the pitch, it was top level," Welsh recalls. "I didn't realise how good a decision it was to join Motherwell until close to the end of the season, when you start getting the recognition. I would say that's all down to how he coached me."

Players speak about Berthel Askou with something approaching awe and Welsh is no different. "He just gave me pure belief," he says. "He made the game so simple for the team and that helped me as well.

"Every single day, so detailed, how he analysed teams, how he analysed specific ways of playing against teams. The biggest influence on my career by a distance. He completely changed how my career path turned out."

The move to Swansea - his Motherwell pal EIijah Just is alongside him - was another good decision. A manager, Vitor Matos, who appreciates him. A dressing room that's talented and driven. Top of the league after eight games. So far, so good.

Like Berthel Askou and Matos, new Scotland head coach Sebastien Pocognoli trusts him, too. Welsh always had it in the back of his mind that if he kept going with Motherwell and then Swansea that something might happen with his country.

It has - and he's seized the moment. Three caps should become four on Tuesday. If one win becomes two then we might be reminded of his smiling younger self again.

It takes talent, resilience and good fortune in finding managers who believe in you, but dreams can come true. Welsh is living proof of it.

Watch Stephen Welsh's full interview with Tom English on the BBC Scottish Football YouTube channel HERE, external.

Pick your Scotland XI

Pick your Scotland XI. %!s()

FIFA World Cup holders Spain can confirm their ticket to the UEFA Nations League quarterfinals when they face Croatia on their trip to Split.

Recommended Stories

• list 1 of 3Ronaldo-less Portugal beat Norway 2-1 to reach Nations League quarterfinals
• list 2 of 3Fernandes denies Portugal rift, hails Ronaldo after walk out
• list 3 of 3Fernandes calls Ronaldo and denies Portugal rift ahead of Norway game

With a perfect record in the tournament and an overall 41-match unbeaten streak, the odds swing heavily in Spain’s favour to clinch victory.

La Roja’s attack has been on fire this term – they have netted 10 goals from seven scorers in three games, with teenage sensation Lamine Yamal leading the scoring charts.

Unlike Spain, Croatia’s performance has been far from exemplary, with Luka Modric’s side suffering their heaviest defeat in history in the last fixture.

Before the clash of generations 2.0 between Yamal and Modric, Al Jazeera breaks down everything you need to know:

What is the UEFA Nations League?

The UEFA Nations League was founded in 2018 to reduce the number of meaningless friendlies and give nations competitive matches against equally ranked teams.

In this competition, countries from across Europe participate in a league structure, which features promotion and relegation.

How does the UEFA Nations League work?

The teams compete across four divisions, facing every other team in their group twice: Once at home and once away. The league phase ends in November.

In the top league, League A, the top two teams from each group advance to the quarterfinals, which take place in March 2027.

The finals will again be contested between four teams. The host and dates of the finals have not been confirmed yet.

How have Croatia and Spain played in the Nations League?

Croatia are third in this group with three points from three games.

• Czechia 1-2 Croatia
• Spain 4-1 Croatia
• Croatia 0-7 England

Spain are first in the group with nine points.

• England 2-3 Spain
• Spain 4-1 Croatia
• Spain 3-1 Czechia

Croatia vs Spain: Head-to-head

• Matches: 12
• Croatia wins: 3
• Spain wins: 7
• Draws: 2

Croatia vs Spain: Form guide

(Last five matches; latest match first)

Croatia: L-L-W-L-W

Spain: W-W-W-W-W

Who are the top players to watch?

Luka Modric and Ivan Perisic (Croatia): The evergreen Modric, very much the heartbeat of the Croatian midfield even at 41 years old, has found the net once in this campaign. His fellow experienced teammate, Perisic, has also been impactful with his two assists.

Lamine Yamal and Alex Baena (Spain): With four goals in three games, Yamal is the joint leading scorer in this year’s Nations League, alongside three others, including England’s Harry Kane. The Barcelona star has found the net in each game, including a double against Croatia in the initial face-off in Seville. Atletico Madrid’s Baena, on the other hand, has been influential in more ways than one, bagging two assists and a goal.

Team news and predicted lineups

Croatia

Centre-back Martin Erlic is sidelined with injury until mid-October, while Josip Juranovic is unavailable due to illness.

Probable Croatia XI: Dominik Livakovic; Josip Stanisic, Luka Vuskovic, Josko Gvardiol, Ivan Perisic; Luka Modric; Franjo Ivanovic, Petar Sucic, Mateo Kovacic, Martin Baturina; Petar Musa

Spain

As many as four Spain squad players are doubtful due to injuries: Ferran Torres (physical discomfort), Alejandro Grimaldo (thigh), Joan Garcia (knee) and Nico Williams (thigh).

Probable Spain XI: David Raya; Ivan Fresneda, Robin Le Normand, Aymeric Laporte, Fran Garcia; Rodri, Pedri; Lamine Yamal, Dani Olmo, Alex Baena; Roberto Fernandez

Croatia vs Spain: TV channel, livestreaming

• Croatia: gol
• Spain: RTVE PLAY
• United Kingdom: Prime Video UK
• United States: FOX Sports, FuboTV, ViX
• India: Sony Sports Network
• Middle East and North Africa: beIN SPORTS
• South Africa: DStv Stream

You can find your regional broadcaster on UEFA’s official list. %!s()

Emma, a 28-year-old bartender, had never before taken direct action and was the most nervous of the four plotters from Pull The Plug, one of a growing number of AI-focused campaign groups around the world.

Around the table were a former climate protester and a campaigner versed in the anti-nuclear movement. Emma signed up after a summer of feeling rising alarm at the catastrophic risks of AI, first when a swarm of OpenAI agents escaped their training “sandbox”, cheated, deceived and conspired to hack into the Hugging Face website and then as Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, quit with an apocalyptic warning that superintelligent AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

As darkness fell they crossed the Thames to the Claremont hotel where Emma filmed while two others unfurled a banner in a function room, shouting “Pull the plug on Nvidia” and “Pull the plug on Palantir”. Hundreds of protesters also staged a rally in front of Palantir’s London HQ last Thursday.

“We did not consent to the kind of build-out that you are planning here,” the activists yelled as they were wrestled out of the door. They edited a video clip – “activist disrupts elite AI network dinner – Nvidia edition” – and uploaded it to Instagram. It was a small gesture, but they had made their stand.

“I want to show other people that they don’t have to feel powerless among all of these articles coming out [about AI doom],” said Emma. “It’s easy to fall into a spiral that it’s too late. This shows people they can address the tech executives, disrupt their meetings, make them feel uncomfortable and get some answers.”

Pull The Plug was launched in January and has about 300 members – mostly aged from 20 to 40. It is backed by an anonymous funder who works in the technology industry, organisers said. Several campaigns resisting AI acceleration are funded by tech insiders.

Pull The Plug advocates direct action – a tactic other AI campaigns have rejected. Last month, one of its members climbed on to a chair in a packed AI conference in London addressed by speakers from OpenAI and Amazon and delivered an impassioned speech.

“Best case scenario: the men handling this technology are completely incompetent,” the female activist said in an outburst that garnered 153,000 Instagram likes and was picked up by the Washington Post. “Worst case scenario: we are all being led into a disaster.”

Other AI protest movements are gaining momentum after a torrent of news about AI dangers. Anthropic told investors this week that advanced AI could pose “existential risks to humanity”. Pause AI, a confederation of campaign groups in 17 countries, saw a fourfold jump in sign-ups when worrying news about rogue AI agents was breaking in August and last month.

“We have had a lot of volunteers who have suddenly decided to dedicate way more of their time to the cause,” said Maxime Fournes, a Cambridge-educated mathematician and deep learning engineer who is chief executive of PauseAI Global. Volunteer sign-ups doubled to about 100 a week after the Hugging Face incident and soared to 681 in the week of Coxon’s “kill us all” warning, when PauseAI organised protests in Paris, London and Berlin.

Donald Trump may be one of the movement’s most important recruiting sergeants. He announced last week that he wanted AI companies to “self-police” despite widespread demands, including from the companies, for federal and international rules to limit AI-enabled cyber-attacks and bioweapons.

The surge in worrying news has given campaigners like Fournes hope that “we could actually survive this situation”. He added: “Suddenly we have a large fraction of the world population that is waking up.”

Joseph Miller, an AI safety researcher who has suspended his doctoral studies at Oxford University to run Pause AI’s UK branch, noticed the shift while campaigning outside Brixton tube station in London. He said: “It was the easiest flyering we’ve ever done, because people would just come and talk to me … one every few minutes.”

People he spoke to were worried about cognitive decline in schools and AI resulting in sloppy work in the office. “I heard ‘killing everyone’ more from young people,” Miller added.

Pausing or halting AI is a cause that cuts across political and generational boundaries, according to campaigners. University students sign up because they fear AI will wreck career paths, while older conservationists rally against datacentre construction.

In Scotland, where at least 21 datacentres are planned, Action to Protect Rural Scotland, a 100-year old charity better known for campaigning for green belt land, said its supporter list had swollen from 400 to 4,000.

“I’ve never seen grassroots energy like this,” said Kat Jones, the charity’s director. She affectionately calls it “a campaign of nerds” with supporters probing the workings of AI datacentre cooling systems and the power grid and lodging freedom of information requests.

AI’s need for vast physical infrastructure has provided a “very physical, concrete object of protest”, said Fournes, and, in some cases, a target for direct action. In the last year, far-left or anarchist groups protesting over the climate crisis and AI have claimed responsibility for criminal attacks on infrastructure in France and Germany.

In August, Wynd Kaufmyn, became the first anti-AI protester believed to have been jailed for taking direct action – in her case blocking the entrance to OpenAI’s HQ in San Francisco. In April, another protester hurled a petrol bomb at the house of the company’s chief executive, Sam Altman. The same month, an attacker fired gunshots into the home of an Indianapolis politician in protest at datacentre plans.

Mauro Lubrano, assistant professor of terrorism and political violence at the University of Leiden, said that if rising demands for accountability, transparency, and democracy in AI governance were not met, more people could get drawn to violence.

“It’s quite likely that we will see anti-AI violence becoming more prominent as a driver to political violence,” he said, citing last month’s vandalism of a Canadian AI institute, Mila, and a nearby software company in Montreal. Windows were smashed and graffiti scrawled reading “burn the data centers”.

Some Pull The Plug activists have diverted their energy from Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion. One member of Emma’s cell glued herself to roads to protest against the climate crisis – tactics that have alienated the public.

Such direct action is “extremely counterproductive”, said Fournes who predicted it would trigger “an immune response” from wider society and would provide “a golden opportunity for the AI labs … to say, they are criminals and it is easier to turn the broader public against the movement against the development of AI”.

Whatever the tactics, a movement is stirring. %!s()

An attempt to use prosthetics to better resemble Altman was unsuccessful (“totally ridiculous,” according to Guadagnino), so much so that Garfield laughed as he recalled how badly that experiment went when reminded of it by The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet ahead of Artificial‘s world premiere at the 2026 New York FIlm Festival.

Instead, ironically for the tech-forward film, Garfield relied on a classic acting technique and human conversations (an analog version of crowdsourcing).

“When you’re first learning about acting, one of the techniques, Stanislavski, is you go through the play and you see what this person says about other characters. You see what other characters say about him,” Garfield told THR. “So I tried to speak to as many people as possible who know Sam or who have experiences and interactions with Sam to glean more of an objective, moral side, looking in point of view. Everyone is an unreliable narrator. I felt like I needed to absorb as much as possible, put it in the cauldron, put it in the pot, put it on simmer and then [use] my own instincts and interpretation and point of view, because any other actor would have played it differently. I know that I needed to play it in the way that I wanted to play it.”

Artificial tells the story about both the origins of OpenAI and the rise of the artificial intelligence phenomenon, including the Silicon Valley figures at the forefront of the technology. Garfield, like his fellow castmembers in the film, looked to interviews and videos of his real-life counterpart, with Anora breakout Yura Borisov, who plays OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, also taking a surprisingly ethereal approach.

“I hit a wall, and it was a couple of days before we started to shoot,” Borisov explained of his preparations. “We have the same birthdays (Dec. 8), and I imagined, ‘OK maybe we have some spiritual connection because of this, and I can just relax and create my own character inspired by him.'”

Not Suitable for Work alum Will Angus plays former OpenAI researcher turned Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and relished playing the exec at a time when he was somewhat under the radar.

“When we were shooting the movie, [Amodei] definitely wasn’t as in the zeitgeist as he is now, so it was very cool to learn about it from the ground floor,” Angus told THR. “We treated him well. … He really had this anxiety to make sure that AI was morally aligned with humanity so I kind of enjoyed being in that role.”

Amodei has pushed for federal safety regulations around the technology and, just last month, called for an industrywide slowdown of AI development to give safety measures time to catch up.

When asked if he believes Amodei’s AI safety concerns, Angus was cautiously optimistic.

“I hope he’s doing the best he can to make sure AI’s aligned with human goals,” he said. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

Neon, which acquired Artificial after Amazon MGM Studios abruptly dropped the nearly completed film in June, plans a Christmas Day release for the movie, which was written by Saturday Night Live alum Simon Rich and also stars Ike Barinholtz as Elon Musk, Monica Barbaro as OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Cooper Hoffman, Mark Rylance, Will Price, Chris O’Dowd, Billie Lourd, Zosia Mamet, Jason Schwartzman, Cooper Koch, Thaddea Graham, Nicholas Hamilton and Angus Imrie. %!s()