Poolside launches Laguna S 2.1, an 118B open-weight model built for agentic coding and long-horizon work, that it says competes with larger open models (Iain Martin/Forbes)

<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/07/21/american-open-source-labs-think-they-can-beat-chinas-best-ai-startups/"><img align="RIGHT" border="0" hspace="4" src="http://www.techmeme.com/260721/i42.jpg" vspace="4" /></a> <p><a href="https://www.techmeme.com/260721/p42#a260721p42" title="Techmeme permalink"><img height="12" src="http://www.techmeme.com/img/pml.png" style="border: none; padding: 0; margin: 0;" width="11" /></a> Iain Martin / <a href="http://www.forbes.com/">Forbes</a>:<br /> <span style="font-size: 1.3em;"><b><a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/07/21/american-open-source-labs-think-they-can-beat-chinas-best-ai-startups/">Poolside launches Laguna S 2.1, an 118B open-weight model built for agentic coding and long-horizon work, that it says competes with larger open models</a></b></span>&nbsp; &mdash;&nbsp; Chinese open-source models like Kimi, Deepseek and Qwen are now dominant AI tools.&nbsp; American upstarts like Mira Murati's Thinking Machines &hellip; </p>