Poolside Releases Open Model Laguna Xs 2.1, Outperforms Claude Haiku 4.5 on Some Tests
Poolside continues a rare US strategy of releasing open models, but the latest version still trails Chinese competitors like Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on every benchmark.
Reporting from 1 sources: GIGAZINE.
US AI company Poolside announced Laguna XS 2.1 on July 2, 2026. The open model is an update to April's Laguna XS.2, with 33 billion total parameters and 3 billion active parameters. It outperformed Claude Haiku 4.5 on several benchmarks but lagged behind Chinese open model Qwen3.6-35B-A3B across all tests. The model runs locally on a Mac with 36GB of memory.
Poolside, a US AI company, released Laguna XS 2.1 on July 2, 2026. The open model is an updated version of Laguna XS.2, which came out in April. It keeps the same architecture: a mixture-of-experts model with 33 billion total parameters and 3 billion active parameters.
Benchmark comparisons show Laguna XS 2.1 scored higher than its predecessor on SWE-bench Multilingual, a test of support for multiple programming languages. It also outperformed Claude Haiku 4.5 on several tests. But the Chinese open model Qwen3.6-35B-A3B beat it on every benchmark shown.
The model is designed for local operation and runs on a Mac with 36GB of memory. Poolside distributes it under the OpenMDW license, promoted by NVIDIA and the Linux Foundation. Quantized versions in FP8, INT4, and NVFP4 formats are also available for machines with less memory.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.