venturebeat
American AI startup Poolside launches free, high-performing open model Laguna XS.2 for local agentic coding

The AI race lately has felt a bit like a game of tennis: first, Anthropic releases a new, pricey state-of-the-art proprietary model for general users (Claude Opus 4.7), then, a week or so later, its rival OpenAI volleys back with one of its own (GPT-5.5). And all the while, Chinese companies like DeepSeek and even Xiaomi are seeking to appeal to users by playing a different game: nearing the frontier, but with open licensing and far lower costs. So it's a big surprise when a new, affordable, highly performant open source contender from the U.S. emerges. Today, we got one from the smaller, lesser-known U.S. AI startup, Poolside, founded in San Francisco in 2023.The company launched its two new Laguna large language models, both of which offer affordable intelligence optimized for agent [...]

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venturebeat
MiniMax-M2 is the new king of open source LLMs (especially for agentic tool calling)

Watch out, DeepSeek and Qwen! There's a new king of open source large language models (LLMs), especially when it comes to something enterprises are increasingly valuing: agentic tool use — that [...]

Match Score: 97.91

venturebeat
Amazon’s OpenAI gambit signals a new phase in the cloud wars — one where exclusivity no longer applies

Amazon Web Services on Tuesday launched one of the most consequential enterprise AI plays in the company's 20-year history, simultaneously bringing OpenAI's most powerful models to its Bedro [...]

Match Score: 87.83

venturebeat
Cursor's Composer 2 was secretly built on a Chinese AI model — and it exposes a deeper problem with Western open-source AI

The $29.3 billion AI coding tool just got caught with its provenance showing. When Cursor launched Composer 2 last week — calling it "frontier-level coding intelligence" — it presented t [...]

Match Score: 87.72

venturebeat
Moonshot's Kimi K2 Thinking emerges as leading open source AI, outperforming GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5 on key benchmarks

Even as concern and skepticism grows over U.S. AI startup OpenAI's buildout strategy and high spending commitments, Chinese open source AI providers are escalating their competition and one has e [...]

Match Score: 86.94

venturebeat
What to be thankful for in AI in 2025

Hello, dear readers. Happy belated Thanksgiving and Black Friday!This year has felt like living inside a permanent DevDay. Every week, some lab drops a new model, a new agent framework, or a new “th [...]

Match Score: 85.75

venturebeat
Mistral launches powerful Devstral 2 coding model including open source, laptop-friendly version

French AI startup Mistral has weathered a rocky period of public questioning over the last year to emerge, now here in December 2025, with new, crowd-pleasing models for enterprise and indie developer [...]

Match Score: 84.19

venturebeat
Apple integrates Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s Codex into Xcode 26.3 in push for ‘agentic coding’

Apple on Tuesday announced a major update to its flagship developer tool that gives artificial intelligence agents unprecedented control over the app-building process, a move that signals the iPhone m [...]

Match Score: 80.76

venturebeat
A European AI challenger goes after GitHub Copilot: Mistral launches Vibe 2.0

Mistral AI, the French artificial intelligence company that has positioned itself as Europe's leading challenger to American AI giants, announced on Tuesday the general availability of Mistral Vi [...]

Match Score: 80.42

venturebeat
Kilo launches AI-powered Slack bot that ships code from a chat message

Kilo Code, the open-source AI coding startup backed by GitLab cofounder Sid Sijbrandij, is launching a Slack integration that allows software engineering teams to execute code changes, debug issues, a [...]

Match Score: 79.63