Back in October 2024, Poolside was an early AI star. Cofounded by former Github CTO Jason Warner, the startup had raised $500 million on a $3 billion valuation to build coding agents for governments and large companies. But over the next 18 months, Poolside largely disappeared from view, while OpenAI and Anthropic ballooned to nearly trillion-dollar valuations with a crop of Chinese labs building open source models nipping at their heels.

Now Poolside is back with a new model called Laguna that on public benchmarks beats its American and Chinese open source competition — with the very notable exception of Chinese lab Moonshot’s latest AI model, Kimi K3.

"As an American company building for the West, we'll be the most capable open model in the West,” Warner, Poolside’s co-CEO and cofounder, tells Forbes. “Globally, in this weight class of the 118 billion parameter model, we are the leader.”

Warner claims that the startup spent those 18 months where it went quiet building the infrastructure for a “model building factory” that could pump out Laguna and continue with new and more powerful iterations every five weeks. "The classic notion of model building is an artisanal process…We've built an industrial model-building process,” he says.

He concedes that Laguna has a long way to go to match the capabilities of the top closed models from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the new version of Kimi that was dropped by Beijing, China-based lab Moonshot on July 16. But its models are significantly smaller. OpenAI and Anthropic have not disclosed the size of their latest models but Moonshot said that Kimi K3 was a 2.8 trillion parameter model— a whopping 20 times the size of Poolside’s new release. Warner says that Poolside plans to build bigger models that could in time compete with frontier labs.

The startup also launched a smaller series of models earlier this year without much fanfare. Warner said it had shared model weights from the get go with its small, undisclosed number of government and corporate clients but since April........

© Forbes