> 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
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.
Not sharing the data is pretty standard because 1) it tends to get the lawyers involved and 2) good data is critical for getting good results.
Imo you can get better results with great data and generic modeling techniques than with incredible modeling techniques and crappy data. Because if you have crappy data, you won’t even know if your model is good because your evals will also be bad.
This is why Anthropic is throwing a fit about the Chinese distillation “attacks”. Clean reasoning traces are gold.
this is very normal for frontier lab companies. you need good data either synthetic or labelled (all the chinese open source models have their own armies of data labelers)
Data has copyright issues, so one can't share it generally without getting permissions from all of the copyright holders. The data is not theirs to share, anyways. The derived (learned) weights are a different matter.
True for the pre-training data scraped from diverse sources. Less so for the later stage data for RL which is by all account more of a differentiator. In most cases the labs themselves produced the data so they are the copyright holders (or they are borrowing it from other labs via distillation). A lot of it is synthetic data, and since you can't copyright AI output, it becomes less about copyright and more about trade secrets.
If I train a model on a song's lyrics, and the user asks the model to recite the song, and it does, so in RLHF I downvote the generation because it refused-to-refuse to regurgitate the song's lyrics... is that RLHF session copyright-encumbered?
Companies pay lots of money for proprietary agentic trajectories which are used during RL. These are things like "Task: summarize stock levels for months end accounting" which then traces the task though using SAP to look at different SKU stock levels, exporting them and generating summary Excel spreadsheets.
This is very different to the "scrape the internet" datasets that a table stakes for training a LLM.
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.
Is that all that a company about to give away the product of 10,000 GPUs running for a month gets to be now? give it away without a single promotional post or shut up? I support open source as much as the person but this is pretty caustic.
I am also starting to take issue with "we've developed a new cutting edge model, and nobody can use it" announcements. Most recently with Google's Argon, at least they were using it internally and they'd be slowly rolling it out. This one is from a company I've never heard of, they're not releasing weights or offering API access at this point, it feels like a fairly worthless announcement.
It says in the very beginning that everything will be opened up by the end of the month. Maybe slightly annoying to you but not worthless. I for one am very excited to see some new American open models since we have called so far behind the Chinese. Looking forward to trying it out.
The open weight community really is an odd one. Millions of Dollars for pre and post training given away for free and most often with very permissive licenses that allow commercial use (be it US, EU or mostly Chinese)
Yet going by the comments on localLlaMA or HN, those companies are the devil :-D. Colour me surprised.
You know, the other night I trained a model on my secret stash of GPUs, that now outperforms Opus 5.5 on pelican benchmark and Jev on classification speed, while running on a potato.
In the case of Facebook, no good thing they do will ever undo the evil things they've done, let alone the evil things they're still doing right now. How convenient for the devil that a single act of "charity" should make him immune from all criticism. By all means, praise whatever good Facebook does in the world, but don't kid yourself about what Facebook is.
I don’t understand what is wrong with some people lol. It says in the very beginning everything will be opened up by the end of the month. It’s like a bunch of toddlers throwing their milk cup on the ground and pouting because they can’t have their new toy right now!
> give it away without a single promotional post or shut up?
I think the point is that people are happy to see promotional posts when they actually release it, but only then and not before.
Unfortunately pinky promises from corporations to release something at some indeterminate time in the future aren't worth the bytes they're stored in, especially in the AI industry which is full of grifters and charlatans.
> Beam is undergoing final red-teaming and evaluations. You can sign up here for early access to the model. We will release the weights, technical report, model card, and developer artifacts later this month.
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.
All of those are good references. Other folks in the thread are missing distinctions between pre training (~the internet + curated sources) and post training (~instructions and RL)
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.
Model weights (what is being tested here) don't inherently "access the web" when inference is running. If the model has access to a web search tool, that's a different story.
Thanks for pointing this out, it's a great point. The team did not realize that the trend went that far back.
We've updated the caption to read: "Land/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. Despite not being trained on multimodal inputs like images, Beam runs the analysis in text mode and 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."
Jensen finally gets it and the result is going to be the apotheosis of "commoditize your complement".
This will likely be great for humanity, since certain vulture-like entities are going to be prohibited from monopolizing a transformative technology for unlimited private gain. Long-run terrible for frontier lab stakeholders. They should probably be seen strictly as option plays on ASI since they're otherwise just financial sinkholes.
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!
Outside of ML metrics, you're monitoring the health of every piece of hardware in the system. You need to make sure that you have every GPU, every CPU, the PCIe buses, the networking fabric are all working without any errors. You need to ensure that you can respond as fast as possible to any possible error. One bad component can bottleneck the entire job.
I really enjoyed reading the log book from the training of OPT-175B at Meta… I guess it’s all classified info but it’d be fun to read a blog post about the crazy day to day issues you run into when doing things at this scale :)
GPU failures are frequent enough that at a certain scale, you constantly have workers dropping out. Designing systems that can still keep training is very interesting!
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
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. …
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.
It takes time / few iterations to get it right (and it's moving target), but yes, expensive trial, my personal feeling is that they went a bit too high, at the same time who knows, maybe good move – as they're saying RL didn't plateau. It feels like they had something like $100M budget for it?
The world will be a better place when we stop espousing Chinese-anything. They don’t treat their people well, they don’t care about them, just cogs in a machine. I’m completely disgusted with how hn people offers China up on a platter like they’re an example of something to emulate, I wish I knew how we got to this point.
Yeah, we should only promote, like... Finnish, Norwegian, maybe Swiss products, like Apertus. Not this unethically-made baby oil[1] from repressive torment nexuses of USA or China.
I myself am on the edge of calling it sarcasm. On one hand, I meant it. I believe it to be true. On the other, I recognize that the options are depressingly scarce and uncompetitive, and I'm saddened by it.
I hear this so much from westerners who have no connection to the people or the country.
-China passed a law forbidding companies from replacing workers with AI.
-China regularly punishes CEOs and corrupt government officials who do bad things.
China promotes open source to the world enabling everyone in every country to have equitable access.
From living in china for over 20 years and talking to many many people, the majority is happy with the trajectory of their country.
Could any for these be said of the west?
I won't get into specifics on which countries regularly throw bombs on children, use starvation and blockades as weapons, and completely disregard the massive dissatisfaction of their citizens...but it sure isn't china.
Please clean your own house first before you complain about your neighbor.
When you live inside of a country that erases inconvenient news or information, of course it will feel like you have a curated experience. They can kill, silence and disappear people, but you will never be allowed to hear about it. They can grab a CEO that gets too cozy with western values and supporting democratic reforms, because Marxism-Leninism is in their constitution.
Of course in any society there will be people that steal money or other universally recognized crimes, so when the state wants to remain in power they will promote news about actions against bad guys while cleaning up any bad news about the government.
It produces masses of either oblivious people or people who know it's probably strange and wrong, but would rather accept it than bother with the hassle of trying to change anything when you know all past attempts have failed.
China carries out more executions than the entire world combined. Even when they caught US CIA spies, China executed them all.
If you look at the way all of these totalitarian or authoritarian countries aligned together seem to engage in diplomacy, they try to put forward an extremely normal face to cloak their country against negative perception.
Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Iran. Torture, assassination, institutionalized rape as punishment, funding terrorism, mass killings, starvation, global harassment networks, intentionally killing over a million Americans from drugs alone as part of unrestricted warfare even subsidizing the precursors ONLY if they're sold outside of the country, ignoring international law and building fake islands in the sea, ramming the ships of neighboring countries, persecuting religious people, purging their military like Stalin and the list goes on.
They intentionally normalize disappearance so that when someone disappears in their society, it's not considered overly strange. They cannot contact their family, their lawyer, their friends or any other organizations. They will not experience a just process and acquittal is basically unheard of.
They do a bad job of caring about people or human life even if there are public statements to the contrary. They constantly fail their people and cause unnecessary death, then under-report it or censor it. They lied about their COVID deaths and even cleaned up any evidence so that no international investigation could occur and the CCP could frame it any way they like, they censor deaths caused by floods they themselves caused by their poor planning, they censor the fact that Chinese companies poorly constructed the buildings in Venezuela that collapsed in the earthquake killing 10s of thousands of people unnecessarily, they lie about the schools in China that collapsed killing countless thousands of students. They were thinking over half of all residential buildings in China would need to be replaced, it was that bad.
How can anyone living in a country like that, have a clear eyed view of how good their society is to live in, when any information that should help you better understand it so you can improve your own society, is simply vanished? Is it just like, well, so long as it doesn't happen to me, it's fine! I don't see the problem! That is insane.
The problem we have here in the west, is that the CCP was founded by Comintern which had open ambitions to achieve total worldwide communist revolution in order to erase capitalism since true communism cannot coexist with it and this was a major cause of World War 2. The CCP has regularly lamented the fall of the Soviet Union and aim to do everything possible to prevent the CCP from collapsing that way.
There isn't any obvious open communication from the CCP to that effect, but the way they are expanding globally, with unprecedented influence, infiltration, etc and the most rapid military buildout in history combined with all the countries aligned with China starting to attack their neighbors, the question is fair to ask. China has this philosophy of using your enemy's own sword against th...
China didn't pass a law forbidding companies from replacing workers with AI. There was an unfair termination lawsuit that has been misconstrued as such http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/chinavoices/2026-04/30/content_... but it was applying existing law. If they had followed the provisions of Article 41 (3) of the Labor Contract Law https://english.court.gov.cn/2015-08/17/c_761484_6.htm which explicitly authorizes layoffs if "The enterprise changes its line of production, introduces a major technological updating or adjusts its business method, and, after modification of the labor contracts, still needs to reduce its personnel," there would have been no problem.
This sentiment was really common circa 2005, or at least general anti-China rhetoric, where I lived in the Tri-state. Funnily enough, I have never felt more a cog living here in the U.S. than I do right now. Maybe you are right, but my guess is wherever you live, yours is a bit of a glass house as well.
I disagree. Sure let them play and see if they can improve. But this model has more compute and more training data than the predecessors it fails to surpass. That only means their training regime is inferior if their predecessors did so much more with so much less. That inferiority should not be encouraged.
The reality is they trained a model and it looks worse on benchmarks than Qwen or GLM. I don’t see how sharing the weights hurts anyone? Even when Llama 4 came out and it was a dumpster fire, it didn’t affect me personally.
> That only means their training regime is inferior if their predecessors did so much more with so much less
Hard to imagine how that wouldn’t be the case. They probably missed the boat on distilling Claude (or their lawyers said no), they probably didn’t hire an army of math PhDs to write reasoning traces, they don’t have millions of DAUs in a coding agent to train from, and they probably have less money, less experience, fewer top tier researchers, and fewer resources for experiments. They are an underdog without a doubt.
None of that means they shouldn’t release their model.
Them releasing the weights doesn't hurt anyone. It's the peanut gallery clamoring to put them onto the same pedestal as actual tier 1 companies simply because they aren't named openai or anthropic that is hurtful.
Openai, grok, and Anthropic aren't distilling. Theyre just second class. It's not a big deal, we just shouldn't be lauding them for being second class.
And it still sucks. My apologies to the Cursor team but that's just very very poor performance.
Alternative explanation is that the Chinese have far more technical talent than anyone else, along with the infra and capital to build out these models.
You don't just magically do better than everyone else on every metric on your first go at something. Doing worse than others and refining is how pretty much everything works.
I mean, the obvious way it's better than the Chinese open-weight models is literally the fact that it's not Chinese and is therefore less likely to be banned or restricted. Chinese models cannot be used on certain government systems already in the US, and regulators are actively considering expanding these restrictions more generally (such as adding it to the Entity List).
It's pretty clear from their framing ("Beam advances the Western open-weight frontier") that one of their main selling points is not being a Chinese lab.
I can't imagine that mattering to many individuals, but I guess someone out there has a government contract that forbids the use of foreign models
Reflection is explicitly marketed as the 'US' DeepSeek
seems like they are aiming to provide both inference and RLaaS for american companies and western govts. even if they never fully beat deepseek if they get close enough the fact that they're American will help them close deals
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.
I'm not a particularly technical person -- can anyone share with me why this model is better than a Chinese open source one other than for sovereignty reasons?
Is it worse than the top open-weight Chinese models? Yes, it is, but at least the West has joined the party, and hopefully they will iterate on this and keep up the pace. The Chinese labs will certainly release new and powerful versions soon, so it's all about relative pace right now.
Any time a new lab shows up, folks complain about how their models are worse. Really? It would be nice if a new comer comes from no where and beats everyone, but that's rarely the case. The good thing is that other labs/people are figuring out how to build this, and if they keep at it then this is as bad as it gets for them and it would hopefully get better. A new entrant to the market is good for everyone.
honest question: how honest do you think people are about their improvements and performance compared to objective results when all you do is praise them?
If you don't buy into "America good, China bad" narrative, this new entrant & release by Inclusion Ai is a lot more exciting by every measurable metric.
Nitpicking but I really wish this benchmarks table were easier to read. Should show which columns win in each row and should not require horizontal scrolling to see across.
Beggar choosing: my kingdom for more 90B-133B MoE local models. Especially with disk offload, that is a function/performance sweet spot for Mac workstations with 64GB-128GB of RAM.
165 comments
[ 1.3 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] thread> 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
Imo you can get better results with great data and generic modeling techniques than with incredible modeling techniques and crappy data. Because if you have crappy data, you won’t even know if your model is good because your evals will also be bad.
This is why Anthropic is throwing a fit about the Chinese distillation “attacks”. Clean reasoning traces are gold.
Companies pay lots of money for proprietary agentic trajectories which are used during RL. These are things like "Task: summarize stock levels for months end accounting" which then traces the task though using SAP to look at different SKU stock levels, exporting them and generating summary Excel spreadsheets.
This is very different to the "scrape the internet" datasets that a table stakes for training a LLM.
Xiaomi released a fairly developer-centric dataset like this here: https://huggingface.co/datasets/XiaomiMiMo/MiMo-V2.6-RL-oss
SpreadsheetRL is another fairly specialized dataset: https://spreadsheet-rl.github.io/
>waitlist
weights or gtfo
I think the comment you are replying to is unnecessarily hostile too though.
Yet going by the comments on localLlaMA or HN, those companies are the devil :-D. Colour me surprised.
Will release weights soon.
I think the point is that people are happy to see promotional posts when they actually release it, but only then and not before.
Unfortunately pinky promises from corporations to release something at some indeterminate time in the future aren't worth the bytes they're stored in, especially in the AI industry which is full of grifters and charlatans.
That means that they have the 31th of October as the deadline to make true their claims.
The fact that they give early access to some may mean that they want some beta testers before the public release.
Where do I get the data?
I mean, this many models. They have to start somewhere.
e.g. fineweb dataset is 50TB https://huggingface.co/datasets/HuggingFaceFW/fineweb
I recommend checking papers from Datalogy, Nvidia Nemotron, Ai2 (Ollmo, Tulu, ...) and the recent model from Aleph Alpha if you want to learn more.
Seems sloppy.
We've updated the caption to read: "Land/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. Despite not being trained on multimodal inputs like images, Beam runs the analysis in text mode and 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."
This will likely be great for humanity, since certain vulture-like entities are going to be prohibited from monopolizing a transformative technology for unlimited private gain. Long-run terrible for frontier lab stakeholders. They should probably be seen strictly as option plays on ASI since they're otherwise just financial sinkholes.
I really enjoyed reading the log book from the training of OPT-175B at Meta… I guess it’s all classified info but it’d be fun to read a blog post about the crazy day to day issues you run into when doing things at this scale :)
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.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/rJSG019.jpeg
Of course in any society there will be people that steal money or other universally recognized crimes, so when the state wants to remain in power they will promote news about actions against bad guys while cleaning up any bad news about the government.
It produces masses of either oblivious people or people who know it's probably strange and wrong, but would rather accept it than bother with the hassle of trying to change anything when you know all past attempts have failed.
China carries out more executions than the entire world combined. Even when they caught US CIA spies, China executed them all.
If you look at the way all of these totalitarian or authoritarian countries aligned together seem to engage in diplomacy, they try to put forward an extremely normal face to cloak their country against negative perception.
Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, China, Iran. Torture, assassination, institutionalized rape as punishment, funding terrorism, mass killings, starvation, global harassment networks, intentionally killing over a million Americans from drugs alone as part of unrestricted warfare even subsidizing the precursors ONLY if they're sold outside of the country, ignoring international law and building fake islands in the sea, ramming the ships of neighboring countries, persecuting religious people, purging their military like Stalin and the list goes on.
They intentionally normalize disappearance so that when someone disappears in their society, it's not considered overly strange. They cannot contact their family, their lawyer, their friends or any other organizations. They will not experience a just process and acquittal is basically unheard of.
They do a bad job of caring about people or human life even if there are public statements to the contrary. They constantly fail their people and cause unnecessary death, then under-report it or censor it. They lied about their COVID deaths and even cleaned up any evidence so that no international investigation could occur and the CCP could frame it any way they like, they censor deaths caused by floods they themselves caused by their poor planning, they censor the fact that Chinese companies poorly constructed the buildings in Venezuela that collapsed in the earthquake killing 10s of thousands of people unnecessarily, they lie about the schools in China that collapsed killing countless thousands of students. They were thinking over half of all residential buildings in China would need to be replaced, it was that bad.
How can anyone living in a country like that, have a clear eyed view of how good their society is to live in, when any information that should help you better understand it so you can improve your own society, is simply vanished? Is it just like, well, so long as it doesn't happen to me, it's fine! I don't see the problem! That is insane.
The problem we have here in the west, is that the CCP was founded by Comintern which had open ambitions to achieve total worldwide communist revolution in order to erase capitalism since true communism cannot coexist with it and this was a major cause of World War 2. The CCP has regularly lamented the fall of the Soviet Union and aim to do everything possible to prevent the CCP from collapsing that way.
There isn't any obvious open communication from the CCP to that effect, but the way they are expanding globally, with unprecedented influence, infiltration, etc and the most rapid military buildout in history combined with all the countries aligned with China starting to attack their neighbors, the question is fair to ask. China has this philosophy of using your enemy's own sword against th...
I guess you the shill then :)
Am I missing something?
> That only means their training regime is inferior if their predecessors did so much more with so much less
Hard to imagine how that wouldn’t be the case. They probably missed the boat on distilling Claude (or their lawyers said no), they probably didn’t hire an army of math PhDs to write reasoning traces, they don’t have millions of DAUs in a coding agent to train from, and they probably have less money, less experience, fewer top tier researchers, and fewer resources for experiments. They are an underdog without a doubt.
None of that means they shouldn’t release their model.
Alternative explanation is that the Chinese have far more technical talent than anyone else, along with the infra and capital to build out these models.
My money is on the latter explanation, tbh.
Says who? We know Grok does at the least. They admitted it openly.
500B params performing worse than other OSS of the same size is pretty meaningless if no one will use it.
It's pretty clear from their framing ("Beam advances the Western open-weight frontier") that one of their main selling points is not being a Chinese lab.
I can't imagine that mattering to many individuals, but I guess someone out there has a government contract that forbids the use of foreign models
seems like they are aiming to provide both inference and RLaaS for american companies and western govts. even if they never fully beat deepseek if they get close enough the fact that they're American will help them close deals
It's interesting how the industry converged to this very term, given that very less work is being done by horses since quite a while.
It's great to see a company that acknowledges it still needs improvement instead of making false claims.
participation awards are not helpful.
https://github.com/inclusionAI/Ling
BTW, this is also an AI lab from China
Access is currently limited. We'll contact you if early access becomes available.