> Am I missing something?

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

We're still at the stage where every new entrant is welcome in my opinion. Doesn't need to be record-breaking upon initial release.

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

Yes it's (hopefully) not distilled from every single major American provider.

Apparently there is more to making good models than copying everything on the internet.

new entrant in this weight class, US lab.

Beam goes brrrr