Skip to briefing
B° BriefingdeskOpen Weights AI Open Briefingdesk
Open Weights AIEdition 0005

Open Weights AI: Poolside’s Eight-Week Claim

Poolside makes an ambitious case for compact coding models, Samsung considers a large Mistral investment, and Cisco gates its open-weight bug hunters.

In brief

Poolside AI released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts coding model with 8 billion parameters active per token. Poolside says its benchmarks show the model beating several much larger rivals and says its Model Factory can move from pre-training to release in eight weeks. Samsung is reported to be in talks to invest up to €1 billion in Mistral at a valuation of around €20 billion. Cisco also released two open-weight security models that are available only to vetted Hugging Face users.

Poolside’s Laguna S 2.1: Small Model, Big Claims

Poolside AI has released Laguna S 2.1, its third coding model in three months . The model is a 118-billion-parameter mixture of experts with 8 billion parameters active per token . Poolside says its Model Factory can take a model from pre-training to release in eight weeks .

Poolside says its benchmarks show Laguna S 2.1 beating several much larger rivals, including a recent Thinking Machines release nearly ten times its size .

Samsung Considers a €1bn Mistral Investment

Samsung is reported to be in talks to invest up to €1 billion in French AI startup Mistral, a proposed deal that would value the company at around €20 billion . The Financial Times describes Mistral as seeking to become a leading alternative to US technology companies .

Cisco’s Gated Bug Hunters

Cisco released two open-weight security models, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, designed to find known bugs in existing codebases . The models are available on Hugging Face but only to vetted users . Cisco claims Antares-1B outperforms Google’s Gemini 3 Pro and is comparable to GLM-5.2 .

Sources

Evidence

Source

Open source