Poolside released Laguna S 2.1 on July 21, 2026, a 118B-total-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 8B parameters activated per token, a context window up to 1M tokens, and both thinking and no-thinking modes, positioned as competitive with much larger models including Thinking Machines' recent ~1T open-weights release. In a Latent Space podcast published July 23, 2026, co-founder and co-CEO Eiso Kant described Poolside's "Model Factory": fewer than 70 researchers running roughly 10,000-20,000 experiments per month, streaming data directly into training, immutable data and versioned code for reproducibility, and cycle times cut from six months to five to eight weeks.