American AI startup Poolside launches free, high-performing open model Laguna XS.2 for local agentic coding
The AI race lately has felt a bit like a game of tennis: first, Anthropic releases a new, pricey state-of-the-art proprietary model for general users (Claude Opus 4.7), then, a week or so later, its rival OpenAI volleys back with one of its own (GPT-5.5). And all the while, Chinese companies like DeepSeek and even Xiaomi are seeking to appeal to users by playing a different game: nearing the frontier, but with open licensing and far lower costs. So it's a big surprise when a new, affordable, highly performant open source contender from the U.S. emerges. Today, we got one from the smaller, lesser-known U.S. AI startup, Poolside, founded in San Francisco in 2023.The company launched its two new Laguna large language models, both of which offer affordable intelligence optimized for agent [...]
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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 [...]
Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, the open-weight coding model pitched as the West’s answer to DeepSeek and Qwen
Poolside has released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter open-weight model built for agentic coding that the San Francisco startup says matches or exceeds models several times its size. The model u [...]
Poolside's Laguna S 2.1 is a small open-weight coding model that punches well above its size
Poolside has released Laguna S 2.1, its third coding model in three months. Rather than rely on raw scale, the company trained it to keep checking its work, revise failed approaches, and avoid giving [...]
Z.ai launches ZCode to challenge Cursor, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot in AI coding
Z.ai, the Beijing-based artificial intelligence lab formerly known as Zhipu AI, on Wednesday officially launched ZCode, a free desktop application it describes as an "Agentic Development Environm [...]
MiniMax-M2 is the new king of open source LLMs (especially for agentic tool calling)
Watch out, DeepSeek and Qwen! There's a new king of open source large language models (LLMs), especially when it comes to something enterprises are increasingly valuing: agentic tool use — that [...]
Cursor's Composer 2 was secretly built on a Chinese AI model — and it exposes a deeper problem with Western open-source AI
The $29.3 billion AI coding tool just got caught with its provenance showing. When Cursor launched Composer 2 last week — calling it "frontier-level coding intelligence" — it presented t [...]
Moonshot's Kimi K2 Thinking emerges as leading open source AI, outperforming GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 on key benchmarks
Even as concern and skepticism grows over U.S. AI startup OpenAI's buildout strategy and high spending commitments, Chinese open source AI providers are escalating their competition and one has e [...]
Amazon’s OpenAI gambit signals a new phase in the cloud wars — one where exclusivity no longer applies
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched one of the most consequential enterprise AI plays in the company's 20-year history, simultaneously bringing OpenAI's most powerful models to its Bedro [...]