Needle

About Needle

Automation foundation model for tiny devices: 2-bit, 8-29 MB, tool calls, ASR, structured extraction and embeddings on phones, wearables, smart homes, robots, cars and microcontrollers. - cactus-compute/needle

Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices.We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention is the right primitive for this, and FFN parameters are wasted at this scale.Simple Attention Networks: the…