Whistle now supports live transcription streaming and long audio file transcription. Repo: github.com/cactus-compute/ne…

We release Needle 3: A Sliceable 8-29MB automation foundation model that can match DeepSeek V4 Flash. One set of weights, every depth from 2 to 20 layers a model of its own, 25-121M parameters at CQ2-bit, built on our Simple Attention Networks and running locally at up to 4k tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5. Needle does not chat. Every turn is a function call: give it the tools your app exposes and it picks the right ones and fills every argument from what the user said, or hand it a schema and it returns a typed record. Ask for something no tool covers and you get an empty list, not a guess. That trade is lets 121M parameters trained on 360B tokens of structured data beat models 10x their size on mobile tool calls and match 2-3x bigger models on structured JSON extraction. It runs on mobiles, wearables, smart home devices, small robots and microcontrollers, with prebuilt engines for macOS, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, the browser and WASI hosts. Try it in your browser: cactuscompute.com/needle

Needle 2 was made to be fine tuned. Show it your environment and some data samples - and the 14MB model beats DeepSeek v4 Flash. Read more: cactuscompute.com/needle#fin…

We release Needle 2: A 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home, robots and microcontroller. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM. It is built on our Simple Attention Network findings, compressed to CQ2-bit with Cactus Quants, and baked into its own engine. Needle 2 has 45m parameters trained from the ground up on 140B tool call, device use structured generation tokens. On mobile device use benchmarks, Needle 2 trades wins with frontier small LLMs like LFM2.5 230M, Apple FM Gemma-270m, at 5× to 70× smaller, and 2 bits against their f16. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, between 400–1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges 300–700 on sub-$200 phones such as the Samsung A-Series. Needle also runs on newer microcontrollers like ESP32. A conventional transformer of Needle's width and depth spends 164 MFLOPs per token, and even one squeezed down to Needle's parameter count spends 87, Needle spends 70. Even on a high-end phone, an always-on assistant lives inside a power budget; every MFLOP is milliwatt-hours, and Needle spends 7x to 85x fewer of them per token than the smallest performant LLMs. Read more: cactuscompute.com/needle