DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT vs Laguna S 2.1

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

A fast local generation cousin for low-concurrency work on text, images and video, with optional thinking and Gemma 4's tool format, under Apache 2.0. It needs about 62 GB for Google's BF16 files and runs only in Transformers or SGLang. The main risk is quality, since Google's own figures put it below Gemma 4 26B A4B, and it's labelled experimental.

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.

DiffusionGemma 26B A4B IT

1. Serve it with sglang serve --model-path google/diffusiongemma-26B-A4B-it --dllm-algorithm Gemma4Renoise --trust-remote-code on SGLang v0.5.22 or later, then call /v1/chat/completions
2. In Transformers, install transformers>=5.11.0 and load DiffusionGemmaForBlockDiffusion with dtype="auto"; generation_config.json already holds the recommended sampler
3. Turn thinking on with enable_thinking=True in apply_chat_template or <|think|> at the start of the system prompt, read the reasoning between <|channel>thought and <channel|>, and drop it from history before the next turn
4. Don't rely on temperature, top_p, logit_bias or JSON Schema in SGLang, which ignores or rejects them for this model; validate JSON yourself
5. Streaming arrives one 256-token canvas at a time, not token by token
6. Put images before text in the prompt, and pick an image token budget of 70 to 1,120 by how much detail the task needs

Laguna S 2.1

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
2. 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
3. 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
4. Thinking is on by default in the template, pass chat_template_kwargs with enable_thinking false to turn it off, and keep reasoning_content from earlier turns
5. 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
6. 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
7. Expect occasional tool-schema slips in harnesses unlike Poolside's own, and validate JSON arguments, which Poolside lists as known limitations