Not one to usually repost a fund announcement but BCV and in particular Enrique Salem has been the best partner we could have wished for at Poolside. There are few people I would blindly trust, Enrique is one of them.

Leaving image generation to diffusion but reasoning to an LLM is 🤩 Now take a step further and think about it in the context of robotics with spatial-action models. Work combining modalities is still in the early days.

Testing some new features (experiment API, improved component compatibility testing, new trajectory store) in the @poolsideai Model Factory and with a brand new UI! Just a few of our experiments are on it so far but looking promising.

Agentic evals are messy. A benchmark score tells you something about model performance, but it also reflects the whole system around it: the harness, sandbox, dependencies, timeouts and sometimes a loophole the agent found in the task. That’s why trajectories matter so much to us. They show what the agent actually did and whether the score means what we think it does. We publish them to make that evidence transparent and auditable, giving the wider community more to learn from. Watch @aalSonOfRavi and @ConnorBAdams go deep on all of this with @petergostev from @arena, including some surprisingly creative reward hacks!

we knew the community could make Laguna faster. 2.6x faster is pretty fun :) huge congrats to the winner, and to all 35 solvers who spent the last few weeks pushing Laguna XS 2.1 further! more reasons to build in the open, together 🤝

Excited to launch with @eigenlabs today. It's an open autoresearch competition to make Laguna XS 2.1 inference as fast as humanly (and agentically) possible on consumer Macs. Eigen's agents already found 36.8% faster inference, and that's before the competition even started. The best part of open weights is that the community takes a model further than any of us could. 
Can't wait to see what everyone does on the leaderboard! 

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.

Couldn’t agree more! "I think open technologies are generally safer because there's more sunlight... diversity is more safe than monoculture. Making it possible for people to explore their ideas in a diverse way I think is more safe than trying to create a walled garden where certain ideas are considered safe and certain ideas are considered unsafe." - @ctnzr