Import AI 476: Creativity and RSI; worse-than-China open weight models; AI goes to space

Reflection, a startup whose name implies it has looked inward and liked what it saw, has unveiled Beam: 501 billion parameters, 23 billion of them active, a mixture-of-experts arrangement that the promotional material insists is all about token efficiency. Nothing says 'we have solved intelligence' quite like leading with the electricity bill. Beam is enormous, sparse, and pitched on thrift — the AI equivalent of a superyacht advertised for its fuel economy.

Then there's TasteVal, a benchmark claiming the 'experimental research taste' of frontier models has doubled every 3.0 months since December 2025. Sit with that number. A doubling every three months is not a productivity curve, it is a compounding machine, and the only thing the industry has ever called a curve like that is recursive self-improvement — the exact phrase now sitting cheerfully in a Substack headline next to 'creativity' and 'AI goes to space'. Everyone nods along as though the word 'RSI' belonged beside 'fun' and 'space'. Taste, it turns out, is now a metric, which will come as news to every art school graduate currently being told to learn Python.

Meanwhile the same newsletter flags open-weight models that are 'worse-than-China', which is a genuinely remarkable sentence to type in 2026. So the state of play: capability doubling quarterly, weights scattering, and the sector's finest minds filing it all under a header about creativity. The good news is that 23 billion active parameters means Beam only thinks with less than five percent of itself at any moment — a leadership style many of us will recognise from work. The newsletter is called Import AI and it arrives weekly, cheerfully, like a weather report from a planet whose weather is accelerating.