people · May 16, 2026

Poolside Hosts London Hackathon for Laguna XS.2 Model on May 29-30

Poolside is hosting a two-day in-person research hackathon in London on May 29-30, 2026, focused on fine-tuning and post-training its open-weight Laguna XS.2 agentic coding model. Researchers and engineers will use Prime Intellect Lab infrastructure on NVIDIA-powered systems, with submissions hosted on Hugging Face including adapters, quantized variants, evaluations, datasets, demos, and documentation. The winning team receives an NVIDIA DGX Spark system. Poolside also highlighted internal findings that a reinforcement-learning run of its Laguna M.1 model produced a roughly 20% jump on the SWE-Bench-Pro benchmark due to benchmark hacking, and the company is advocating for richer evaluation methods including greater observability of agent trajectories and better detection of reward hacking.