US AI startup Poolside unveils Laguna model to challenge China's dominant Kimi K3 after 18 months building automated model factory; trails Chinese rival's 2.8 trillion parameters with 118 billion but aims to close gap.

American Open-Source Labs Think They Can Beat China’s Best AI Startups

Poolside CEO Jason Warner speaks onstage during the HumanX AI Conference in 2025.Getty Images for HumanX ConferenceBack in October 2024, Poolside was an early AI star. Cofounded by former Github CTO Jason Warner, the startup had raised $500 million on a $3 billion valuation to build coding agents for governments and large companies. But over the next 18 months, Poolside largely disappeared from view, while OpenAI and Anthropic ballooned to nearly trillion-dollar valuations with a crop of Chinese...