Tuesday 6 October 2026
Top stories today:
Reflection’s Beam open model debuts, rivaling GLM-5.2, Qwen3.8
DeepSeek raising $12B+ ahead of early-2027 IPO
SpaceX +8% to 4-month high, returns Elon Musk to trillionaire status
Moonshot AI hits $50B valuation, targets $5B IPO in Q1 2027
Etched seeks funding at $40B-$50B valuation amid AI chip boom
0. Data & Calendar
All values as of 6 AM ET / 3 AM PT, other than S&P500 and NASDAQ close (4 PM ET / 1 PM PT).
No major events today.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. Reflection’s Beam 501B open-weight model debuts, taking on GLM-5.2, Qwen3.8-Max
Beam competes with China’s GLM-5.2 and Qwen3.8-Max across key benchmarks:
Beam uses 3-4x less inference compute than GLM-5.2 while delivering comparable results, Reflection said.
This month: Beam’s weights will be released under an Apache 2.0 license, the company said.
Beam has 23B active parameters and was trained end-to-end from scratch.
Reflection’s next model is already in training and will be “much more” powerful and performant than Beam, co-founder and CEO Misha Laskin said.
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3. DeepSeek said to be raising $12B+ ahead of early-2027 IPO
CATL and Tencent have reportedly been the biggest contributors to the ongoing round.
The round could reach ¥100B (~$14.9B) based on signed term sheets.
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5. SpaceX +8% to 4-month high, returns Elon Musk to trillionaire status
Sun.: a Morgan Stanley note called SpaceX “cheap” at current prices.
Musk is currently worth $1.03T, per Forbes’ real-time billionaires list, factoring in his Tesla and SpaceX holdings.
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7. Moonshot AI said to hit $50B valuation, target $5B Hong Kong IPO in Q1 2027
The company has started gauging investor sentiment through early-look meetings.
Moonshot’s ARR is expected to rise to $2B by Dec., from $1B currently.
The IPO timing could change as deliberations are ongoing.
