AI for coding

2 stories about AI for coding, newest first. Each one links to its primary source.

1. Oct 8

   Microsoft releases MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, a coding model it says costs a quarter of MAI-Code-1.0

   On 7 October 2026 Microsoft AI released MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, which it says costs a quarter of MAI-Code-1.0 and uses 25% fewer tokens per task. It is live in GitHub Copilot and can be downloaded to run locally, with more than 120 GB of RAM recommended. Microsoft gives no dollar price, license or download location, and all figures are its own.

   Models, Coding 1 source

2. Oct 7

   Reflection announces Beam, a 501B open-weight model it says matches GLM-5.2 at 3–4x less compute

   Reflection announced Beam on 5 October 2026, a 501-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 23 billion active parameters. The company says it will release the weights under Apache 2.0 later in October. The benchmark scores are Reflection's own, and in its table Beam trails several newer Chinese models.

   Models, Open-weight, Coding 2 sources