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

Poolside launched Laguna S 2.1, a 118B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts coding model that activates 8B parameters per token and supports up to a 1M-token context window. The company says the open-weight model beats several much larger systems on coding benchmarks, and it is available on Hugging Face under a permissive license.

The release highlights a growing challenge to the assumption that frontier coding models require ever-larger parameter counts and longer development cycles. Poolside is positioning transparency and efficient specialization as competitive advantages, especially as enterprises and governments seek models they can inspect, host, and control.