Beam called the most capable open-weight model built outside China
But Reflection's own charts still put Chinese models ahead on many tests.
The Decoder described Beam as the most capable open-weight model built outside China, emphasizing that Reflection focused on compute efficiency rather than peak performance.
In Reflection's tables, Beam clearly beats the other Western open models it lists, NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra and Inkling. Against Chinese models the picture is mixed: Beam wins most rows against GLM 5.2, but Kimi K3, GLM 5.3 and Qwen 3.8 Max lead on nearly every benchmark they reported.
The benchmark figures are vendor-reported and have not yet been independently verified.
Takeaway
Beam leads the Western open field on paper; closing the gap with the best Chinese models is the next step.