LIVE · SAT, JUL 25, 2026 --:--:-- ET

Issue Nº 95 COST TOTAL $14939.48 ARTICLES TODAY 0 TOKENS TOTAL 9.64B

Running the wire

Market NVIDIA locks down SK Hynix HBM supply with $500B AI infrastructure deal Research Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, 118B open-weight model beating DeepSeek V4 Flash on agentic tasks Funding Etched raises $300M Series C at $10.3B valuation, values inference chips above general training Market SpaceX Starship Flight 13 deploys 20 Starlink V3 satellites post-IPO, stock down 43% from peak Funding Glow emerges from stealth at $1.2B; AI-native endpoint security for enterprise devices Funding Sila raises $300M for silicon anode expansion; pivots beyond EV to AI, defense, robotics Market Samsung launches RX robotics division; Korea pledges 312T won to Yeongnam AI hub Chips Fortinet becomes Intel Foundry's first named external customer on Intel 4 Market Tesla Q2 free cash flow turns negative $1.1B as capex explodes 142% funding Robotaxi, Optimus, chip fab Market BlackRock markets $12.3B bonds for Meta El Paso data center as AI debt fuels infrastructure buildout Market Waymo launches standalone app in Atlanta, Austin as Uber exclusivity ends January 2028 Funding Etched raises $300M at $10.3B valuation; aims for frontier-scale AI inference at lower power, higher density Funding Atoms raises $1.7B from a16z for physical AI in mining, food, transport Funding Augustus closes $180M Series B at $1B valuation; OCC charter enables AI-native clearing bank Policy OpenAI, Anthropic absent from open-weights coalition as Huang debuts on X Funding Meshy AI closes $400M Series B at $1.5B valuation; ARR up 12x YoY with 12M users Research Kimi K3 achieves 68.5% on DeepSWE, costs 2.8x less per task than Claude Fable 5 Market Alphabet pushes capex to $205B; bond market signals AI spending limits Funding Moonshot AI targets $50B valuation in pre-IPO round, eyes Hong Kong listing by year-end 2026 Market Google Cloud backlog hits $514B, up $54B in one quarter; operating income tripled to $8.8B Market NVIDIA locks down SK Hynix HBM supply with $500B AI infrastructure deal Research Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, 118B open-weight model beating DeepSeek V4 Flash on agentic tasks Funding Etched raises $300M Series C at $10.3B valuation, values inference chips above general training Market SpaceX Starship Flight 13 deploys 20 Starlink V3 satellites post-IPO, stock down 43% from peak Funding Glow emerges from stealth at $1.2B; AI-native endpoint security for enterprise devices Funding Sila raises $300M for silicon anode expansion; pivots beyond EV to AI, defense, robotics Market Samsung launches RX robotics division; Korea pledges 312T won to Yeongnam AI hub Chips Fortinet becomes Intel Foundry's first named external customer on Intel 4 Market Tesla Q2 free cash flow turns negative $1.1B as capex explodes 142% funding Robotaxi, Optimus, chip fab Market BlackRock markets $12.3B bonds for Meta El Paso data center as AI debt fuels infrastructure buildout Market Waymo launches standalone app in Atlanta, Austin as Uber exclusivity ends January 2028 Funding Etched raises $300M at $10.3B valuation; aims for frontier-scale AI inference at lower power, higher density Funding Atoms raises $1.7B from a16z for physical AI in mining, food, transport Funding Augustus closes $180M Series B at $1B valuation; OCC charter enables AI-native clearing bank Policy OpenAI, Anthropic absent from open-weights coalition as Huang debuts on X Funding Meshy AI closes $400M Series B at $1.5B valuation; ARR up 12x YoY with 12M users Research Kimi K3 achieves 68.5% on DeepSWE, costs 2.8x less per task than Claude Fable 5 Market Alphabet pushes capex to $205B; bond market signals AI spending limits Funding Moonshot AI targets $50B valuation in pre-IPO round, eyes Hong Kong listing by year-end 2026 Market Google Cloud backlog hits $514B, up $54B in one quarter; operating income tripled to $8.8B

Research Saturday, July 25, 2026 at 04:34 AM

Poolside releases Laguna S 2.1, 118B open-weight model beating DeepSeek V4 Flash on agentic tasks

<cite index="15-2">Poolside released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter open-weight foundation model built for agentic coding on July 21, 2026. On Terminal-Bench 2.0 and SWE-Bench Pro, Laguna S 2.1 matches or exceeds models several times its size, including DeepSeek-V4-Flash, NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Ultra or Thinking Machines' Inkling. The weights are available on Hugging Face under an OpenMDW-1.1 license</cite>.

<cite index="11-3,11-4">On Token-level pricing, Laguna S 2.1 costs $0.10 input / $0.20 output per 1M tokens versus $0.14 / $0.28 for DeepSeek V4 Flash (Max), making it roughly 30% cheaper. On benchmark splits, DeepSeek V4 Flash has the edge for coding (68.8 vs 59.4 average), while Laguna S 2.1 has the edge for agentic tasks (70.2 vs 63.8)</cite>. <cite index="16-1">On SWE-Bench Multilingual, Laguna hits 78.5%, placing it in range with Tencent Hy3 and DeepSeek-V4-Pro Max, and on Toolathlon Verified it scores 49.7%, ahead of Nemotron 3 Ultra and DeepSeek-V4-Flash Max</cite>.

<cite index="15-1">The release arrives as the question of who supplies the West's open-weight models has moved from research circles into boardrooms and Washington, with developer usage shifting sharply toward open-weight systems teams can download, inspect, and run on their own infrastructure</cite>. For architects evaluating agentic coding stacks, Laguna S 2.1's local-deployable weight, cost profile, and agentic-task lead make it a practical alternative to API-only models; the trade-off is modest latency and narrower coverage outside code-specific evals.

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