Poolside drops Laguna S 2.1, an open-weight coding model that beats rivals 10x its size

Poolside, the San Francisco AI lab that has spent most of its three-year existence quietly selling coding models to governments and defense agencies, released its most capable model to date on Tuesday — and made an unusually aggressive bet that radical transparency, not raw scale, is how a smaller lab competes at the frontier.The model, Laguna S 2.1, is a 118-billion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) system that activates only 8 billion parameters per token, supports a context window of up to 1 million tokens, and — according to benchmarks published by the company — matches or beats open models several times its size on agentic coding tasks. The weights are available immediately on Hugging Face under the permissive OpenMDW-1.1 license.The headline numbers are striking for a model this sma