GoKawiilNeedle
We distilled Gemini 3.1 into a 26m parameter "Simple Attention Network" that you can even finetune locally on your Mac/PC. In production, Needle runs on Cactus at 6000 toks/sec prefill and 1200 decode speed. Weights are fully open on Cactus-Compute/needle, as well as the dataset generation.
d=512, 8H/4KV, BPE=8192 ┌──────────────┐ │ Tool Call │ └──────┬───────┘ ┌┴──────────┐ │ Softmax │ └─────┬─────┘ ┌─────┴─────┐ │ Linear (T)│ ← tied └─────┬─────┘ ┌─────┴─────┐ │ ZCRMSNorm │ └─────┬─────┘ ┌────────┴────────┐ │ Decoder x 8 │ │┌───────────────┐│ ││ ZCRMSNorm ││ ││ Masked Self ││ ││ Attn + RoPE ││ ││ Gated Residual││ │├───────────────┤│ ┌──────────────┐ ││ ZCRMSNorm ││ │ Encoder x 12 │──────────────────────▶Cross Attn ││ │ │ ││ Gated Residual││ │ ┌──────────┐ │ │└───────────────┘│ │ │ZCRMSNorm │ │ └────────┬────────┘ │ │Self Attn │ │ ┌─────┴─────┐ │ │ GQA+RoPE │ │ │ Embedding │ ← shared │ │Gated Res │ │ └─────┬─────┘ │ │ │ │ ┌───────┴───────-┐ │ │ (no FFN) │ │ │[EOS]<tool_call>│ │ └──────────┘ │ │ + answer │ │ │ └───────────────-┘ └──────┬───────┘ │ ┌────┴──────┐ │ Embedding │ └────┬──────┘ │ ┌────┴──────┐ │ Text │ │ query │ └───────────┘
Pretrained on 16 TPU v6e for 200B tokens (27hrs).
Post-trained on 2B tokens of single-shot function call dataset (45mins).
Needle is an experimental run for Simple Attention Networks, geared at redefining tiny AI for consumer devies (phones, watches, glasses...). So while it beats FunctionGemma-270m, Qwen-0.6B, Graninte-350m, LFM2.5-350m on single-shot function call for personal AI, Those model are have more scope/capacity and excel in conversational settings. Also, small models can be finicky. Please use the UI in the next section to test on your own tools, and finetune accordingly, at the click of a button.
Quickstart
git clone https://github.com/cactus-compute/needle.git cd needle && source ./setup needle playground
Opens a web UI at http://127.0.0.1:7860 where you can test and finetune on your own tools. Weights are auto-downloaded.
Usage (Python)
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