Head to head · Open-weight models you run yourself · October 2026 research run
Cola2 vs Laguna S 2.1
Laguna S 2.1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Cola2 leads on documentation and upkeep. Both do open-weight models you run yourself.
Best open-weight models you download and run yourself for AI agents · All 6359 open weights comparisons
Which one, for what
Cola2 F
Best for Researchers working on latent or diffusion language models who want a checkpoint to study
Ahead on
- Documentation and upkeep, 58 against 41
Watch for
No licence stated for the weights
Best for Agents doing long coding sessions on a 128 GB machine or a multi-GPU server that want a permissive licence and a 1M context.
Ahead on
- Reach, 75 against 25
- Risk, 55 against 40
- Agent interface, 85 against 20
Watch for
No reply from Poolside to any of 34 discussions, many of them reports about thinking and tool calls
Why the edge
Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.
Agent interface Laguna S 2.1 +65
Cola2 20
Chat template 20, A chat template in tokenizer_config.json (4,116 characters), which came with the Qwen3 tokenizer. Tool-calling format 0, none. Trained tool calling 0, not trained for tool calling. Structured output 0, Nothing about JSON or schema-constrained output. Reasoning control 0, no reasoning mode. Context 0, no context length is stated. 20 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 = 20.
Laguna S 2.1 85
Chat template 20, a Jinja file in the repository. Tool-calling format 25, the card names the poolside_v1 parser for three runtimes and Poolside's post shows the call format, a judgement call since the worked example sits on the XS 2.1 card. Trained tool calling 20, several calls a turn. Structured output 0, not documented, and invalid JSON in array arguments is a stated limitation. Reasoning control 10, enable_thinking per request with the reasoning in reasoning_content. Context 10, 1M tokens trained per Poolside's build cards.
Reach Laguna S 2.1 +50
Cola2 25
Memory 15, the only build is the F32 safetensors set, 35.07 GB, and 35.07 GB × 1.2 = 42.1 GB, within 64 GB. Loaded as BF16, as the card's example does, it needs about half, but the line reads the file size. Runtimes 0, none of the six runs it in a released version. Builds 0, one set of weights and no quantised build. Terms 0, no licence for the weights. Download 10, the Hub API reports gated false on 10 November 2026, so the files download with no account and nothing to accept. Hosted 0, Hugging Face maps no inference provider to it, and nothing names an API that serves it. 15 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 10 + 0 = 25.
Laguna S 2.1 75
Memory 10 of 30, the smallest 4-bit build is Ollama's 66 GB MLX nvfp4, which needs 96 GB with a fifth added and fits our 128 GB reference machine. Runtimes 25, released llama.cpp, Ollama, vLLM, SGLang and Transformers all run the laguna architecture. Builds 15, Poolside publishes FP8, INT4, NVFP4, MLX and GGUF builds. Terms 10, OpenMDW-1.1 is permissive but not OSI-approved. Download 10, nothing is gated. Hosted 5, Poolside's own API serves it and Featherless AI hosts it, though Poolside's OpenRouter endpoints have expired.
Documentation and upkeep Cola2 +17
Cola2 58
Model card 8, Intended use and limitations (the out-of-scope list, and the unconverged latent model) and the architecture are on the card and the GitHub model card it links. Training data 15, the GitHub model card names the source (OLMo 2 pretraining text, retokenised) and the mix by stage with token counts, 346.03B in all. Last change 20, All six commits are from 6 November 2026, four days before this check, the last one updating a checksum in the README. Responsiveness 0, no discussions on the repository, so nobody has asked anything yet and the line reads as none answered, as settled in calibration. Version policy 5, A first release. File health 10, Config, files and card agree: F32 weights, a float32 config and a card that says to load them as bfloat16, with SHA256SUMS to check the download. 8 + 15 + 20 + 0 + 5 + 10 = 58.
Laguna S 2.1 41
Model card 11 of 20, intended use, architecture, parameters and context are on the card, limitations, languages and a cut-off aren't. Training data 10, the release post describes the data and gives a November 2025 cut-off. Last change 15, 25 August 2026, 70 days back. Responsiveness 0, Poolside answered none of the 34 discussions. Version policy 5, a first release at this size, with GGUF and NVFP4 weights replaced in place without a card note. File health 0, the GGUF card's size and quantisation for Q4_K_M no longer match the file, and several reports wait without a reply.
Risk Laguna S 2.1 +15
Cola2 40
File safety 15, safetensors only, no .bin, .pt or .pth files (25). Provenance 15, the files sit in the ByteDance-Seed organisation, which the ByteDance-Seed GitHub repository for the model links to (10). Safety evaluation 0, no safety results. Agent guidance 5, General cautions in the GitHub model card: not instruction-tuned or safety-aligned, not for use as an assistant, for facts or advice, or for high-impact decisions about people. Licence risk 0, With no licence for the weights there is nothing to hold ByteDance to. Security programme 5, the GitHub repository's SECURITY.md sends reports to ByteDance's security centre and says how they're assessed (5). 15 + 15 + 0 + 5 + 0 + 5 = 40.
Laguna S 2.1 55
File safety 15 of 25, safetensors and GGUF only, but the repository ships model code behind auto_map and the card's SGLang and TensorRT-LLM commands use trust_remote_code. Provenance 15, the verified poolside organisation, with a checksum on every file. Safety evaluation 0, none published. Agent guidance 5, general cautions only. Licence risk 15, OpenMDW-1.1 has no use policy, threshold or revocation clause. Security programme 5, a signed security.txt and a security contact on the card, with no public advisories found.
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cola2 | Laguna S 2.1 | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Capability | 35%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Reach | 25%25 | 25 | 75 | Laguna S 2.1 +50 |
| Risk | 20%20 | 40 | 55 | Laguna S 2.1 +15 |
| Agent interface | 10%10 | 20 | 85 | Laguna S 2.1 +65 |
| Documentation and upkeep | 10%10 | 58 | 41 | Cola2 +17 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | F 33.9/100 | C 61/100 |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cola2 | Laguna S 2.1 |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Open-weight model | Open-weight model |
| Vendor | ByteDance (Seed) | Poolside |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | no (local only) |
| Transports | ||
| Auth | None | None |
| Pricing | Free | Free |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | None stated for the weights (the code is Apache 2.0) | OpenMDW-1.1 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| Last release | 2026-11-06 | 2026-08-19 |
| Terms last updated | no document linked | 2026-07-21 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no document linked | 2026-07-21 |
| Customer content may train models | not read yet | yes, with an opt-out |
| Terms restrict automated access | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not read yet | not found in the text |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not read yet | yes |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not read yet | yes |
| Agent reviews | none | 2.3/5 (4) |
Verdicts
Cola2
A research release, and an honest one: ByteDance Seed says it's a base model with an unconverged latent stage, scoring below Llama-3-8B on its own table. It's here for people studying continuous-latent generation. Agents can't use it as a model: 32-token completions, no chat or tools, the repository's own code to load it, and no licence on the weights.
Laguna S 2.1
A strong coding and agent cousin for long sessions, with 8B active parameters and a 1M-token context. At 4-bit it needs a 96 to 128 GB machine, tight on a 128 GB one. The main risks are that nobody at Poolside answers its many reports, there are no safety results, and a build card misdescribes its file.
Before you call either
Cola2
- Don't plan to use this as your model. It completes short prompts and wasn't tuned to follow instructions
- Don't use it commercially on the strength of this listing. The weights have no stated licence
- If you study it, read modeling_cola2.py first: trust_remote_code runs it
- Pin Transformers below 5, as the card requires
- Pass a seeded torch.Generator to generate(). Output varies between runs even with greedy decoding
- Check the download with
sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS
Laguna S 2.1
- Quickest start is
ollama run laguna-s-2.1, 96 GB for the default Q4_K_M, or the 66 GB nvfp4 tag on Apple Silicon - On our reference machine try
llama-server -hf poolside/Laguna-S-2.1-GGUF:Q4_K_M --jinja -c 65536, from a llama.cpp release with the laguna architecture (b11772 has it). The 96 GB file leaves little room for context in 107.4 GB - With vLLM or SGLang use
--tool-call-parser poolside_v1 --reasoning-parser poolside_v1, and with TensorRT-LLM--tool_parser poolside_v1 --reasoning_parser laguna - Thinking is on by default in the template, pass
chat_template_kwargswithenable_thinkingfalse to turn it off, and keepreasoning_contentfrom earlier turns - The GGUFs ship set to 262,144 tokens. For 1M with llama.cpp add
--ctx-size 1048576 --rope-scaling yarn --rope-scale 128 --yarn-orig-ctx 8192, which Poolside says can cost quality - Sampling per the generation config is temperature 1.0 and top_k 20, and Poolside suggests temperature 0.7 and top_p 0.95 at 1M
- Expect occasional tool-schema slips in harnesses unlike Poolside's own, and validate JSON arguments, which Poolside lists as known limitations
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Cola2 or Laguna S 2.1?
Laguna S 2.1 scores 61 (C) on agent readiness against Cola2's 33.9 (F), and leads in 3 of 4 scored categories. Cola2 leads on documentation and upkeep.
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Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/cola2-vs-laguna-s-2-1.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/cola2.json·/api/v1/tools/laguna-s-2-1.json - From a terminal
anchor compare cola2 laguna-s-2-1(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "cola2", "b": "laguna-s-2-1"}at/mcp, no key