Tag: Needle
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Cactus Needle 3: One Set of Weights, an 8-29 MB Model at Any Depth
Cactus Compute shipped Needle 3 on September 17, 2026, a single set of weights that runs as anything from a 29-million-parameter, 8 MB model to a 121-million-parameter, 29 MB one, depending on how many layers you deploy. It is not a chat model. Needle 3 does three things — tool calling, structured extraction, and text embedding — […]
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Cactus Releases Needle: A 26M Distilled Model for On-Device Tool Calling
Cactus Compute has released Needle, an open-source 26-million-parameter model distilled from Google’s Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite for single-shot function calling. Released under the MIT license, Needle quantizes to a 14 MB INT4 footprint and is designed to run AI agents entirely on phones, smartwatches, and other consumer devices — a sharp contrast to the cloud round-trips […]