For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter. AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country. Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty. The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

Today we are releasing Laguna S 2.1. At 118B total parameters, with 8B active per token, it does the work of models several times its size on agentic coding. It is remarkably persistent across long-horizon tasks. And it is small enough to run on a single NVIDIA DGX Spark. It is far more capable than anything we have created before, and I think it redefines what a model in its weight class can do. Laguna S 2.1 is an important model for Poolside. What it represents is even more important. If, five years ago, I had read a book that said that by 2030 everything economically valuable, scientifically interesting, and personally meaningful would be built on intelligence contracted from three or four companies, I would have called it dystopian science fiction. We are at a fork in the road of what kind of world we can have. I believe intelligence should and will become a commodity. The question is whether that intelligence comes from three companies, or from many people who can build it, own it, and shape it. The open ecosystem will not win by being the best in its own category. No one cares who is king of the open-source kingdom. People want the best intelligence for the task they are trying to do, with the right balance of quality, speed, cost, and control. If we want a different future, open models have to be on par with, or better than, their closed equivalents. Laguna S 2.1 is a meaningful step in that direction: capable enough to compete far above its weight class, efficient enough to run on hardware you can own, and open-weight so anyone can build on it. Open-weighting our models is the contribution we can make today toward a world where intelligence can be built and owned by many. And we will keep doing it. I am very proud of this team’s work. A big shout out to everyone at Poolside who made this possible, from infrastructure and data to architecture, pretraining, post-training, evaluations, and inference. Laguna S 2.1 is available today under the OpenMDW-1.1 license, with weights on Hugging Face and access through OpenRouter and our API. We are building toward a future where the most capable intelligence in the world can be owned and shaped by anyone. Laguna S 2.1 is one step. We are going to keep building until that future exists.

The asymmetry problem When we started the log analysis, we first used "frontier" models behind commercial APIs. This did **not work**: the analysis requires submitting large volumes of real attack commands, exploit payloads, and C2 artifacts, and these requests were **blocked by the providers' safety guardrails**, which cannot distinguish an incident responder from an attacker. We ran the forensic analysis instead on GLM 5.2, an open-weight model, on our own infrastructure. This had a second benefit: no attacker data, and **none of the credentials it referenced, left our environment**.

👑Nemotron 3 Ultra (@NVIDIAAI): 67% overall, 80% in knockouts — the sharpest knockout caller in the field. Nailed USA 1-4 Belgium, the only model to call it. 14-pick streak, 3 rare hits.