VentureBeatApr 28, 09:36 PM
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 agentic workflows (AI that does more than just chat or generate content, but can, in this case, write code, use third-party tools, and take actions autonomously), as well as a new coding agent harness called (fittingly) "pool" and a new web-based, mobile optimized agentic coding development and interactive preview environment, "shimmer," which lets you write code with the Laguna models on the go.
The new AI models that Poolside released today include:
Laguna M.1: a proprietary 225-billion parameter Mixture of Experts (MoE) model with 23 billion active parameters. This flagship model is optimized for high-consequence enterprise and government environments, designed to solve complex, long-horizon software engineering problems that require maximum reasoning and planning capabilities.
Laguna XS.2: an Apache 2.0 open licensed 33-billion parameter MoE with 3 billion active. Engineered for efficiency and community innovation, this model is designed for local agentic coding tasks and provides a versatile foundation for developers looking to fine-tune, quantize, or serve powerful agents on a single GPU. In other words, developers can download and run Laguna XS.2 on their desktop or even laptop computers without an internet connection — completely private and secured.
Notably, as mentioned above, only the smaller of the two models, XS.2, is available now under an open source Apache 2.0 license (on Hugging Face) — yet Poolside is offering even the larger M.1 for free temporarily through its API and third-party distribution partners, OpenRouter, Ollama, and Baseten, making it a great use case for developers who wish to test it out.
Also noteworthy: the two new Lagunas were trained from scratch — not fine-tuned/post-trained base models from Chinese giant Alibaba's Qwen series like some other U.S. labs have pursued lately (*cough cough* Cursor *cough).
As Poolside wrote in a blog post today, it's spent the last few years "focused on serving our government and public sector clients with capable models deployable into the highest-security environments," yet is now going open source "to support builders and the wider research community."
When I asked on X why government agencies