Inside the Model Factory — Eiso Kant, Poolside AI
Poolside AI's Model Factory ships models from pre-training to release in eight weeks.
“would rather live in a world with 100 foundation model companies than five even if Poolside were one of the five”
Poolside AI is emerging with Laguna S 2.1, a model that outperforms competitors nearly 10x its size, backed by a 'Model Factory' running 10,000–20,000 experiments per month. Co-founder Eiso Kant details the engineering pipeline enabling an 8-week pre-training-to-release cycle, with agents increasingly automating the research loop itself. Poolside's embrace of open weights and Kant's preference for a fragmented 100-company ecosystem over a concentrated 5-company one signals a meaningful counterweight to closed-model consolidation.