Google announced that its Beam 3D video conferencing technology (formerly Project Starline) has been deployed at 20 USO locations worldwide, allowing active military members to communicate with their families, following a successful pilot between Fort Bliss, Texas, and Poland.
Brooklyn-based startup Reflection AI has officially released Beam, its first frontier open-weight model. Beam is a 501-billion-parameter, 23-billion-active-parameter text mixture-of-experts model pretrained on 23.8 trillion tokens with a 1 million-token context window. The company says it matches Z.ai's GLM-5.2 on advanced reasoning benchmarks and outperforms leading Western open models while using 3-4x less inference compute, positioning it as a workhorse model for enterprises and developers.