Poolside

A dense wave of open-weight model releases—including Thinking Machines' first model Inkling, Poolside's Laguna S2.1, and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3—signals that consolidation predictions for AI labs have not materialized. Licensing terms, particularly Kimi K3's noncommercial agreement requirement, are emerging as a new front in US-China AI policy.

A wave of open-weight model releases from Thinking Machines, Tencent, Poolside, Moonshot AI, and Meituan signals that model-building capacity is spreading rather than consolidating. The releases range from a 1.6 trillion-parameter MoE trained entirely on Chinese accelerators to a noncommercial-licensed model raising new questions about US-China AI trade.

Poolside has released Laguna S 2.1, a mixture-of-experts coding model with 8 billion active parameters out of 118 billion total, its third coding model release in three months. The company claims it outperforms open-weight models 10 to 20 times its size on agentic coding benchmarks like Terminal-Bench 2.1 and DeepSWE.