Poolside’s Model Factory, Laguna S, Open Models, and the Race to AGI — Eiso Kant, Poolside AI
Poolside's co-founder Eiso Kant argues that model building is primarily an engineering discipline, and that their 'Model Factory' approach enables rapid iteration from data to model. He criticizes tool-calling layers like MCP, advocating instead for models to write code directly to interact with systems. The open-source Laguna S model demonstrates that smaller models can achieve surprising capability through post-training behaviors like persistence and verification, challenging the need for ever-larger models for knowledge work.