Poolside's co-CEO on how his small team of top researchers built a model factory capable of training Laguna S - a 118B MOE beating Thinky's ~1T open weights model... and this is just the beginning.

Chinese open-source models like Kimi and Deepseek are now dominant AI tools. American startups like Thinking Machines, Reflection AI and now Poolside are trying to challenge that.

Poolside's 118B-parameter Laguna S 2.1 matches larger models on coding benchmarks, runs on a single desktop, and targets enterprises wanting to self-host.