GoKawiilCactus releases Needle 3, an 8-29MB on-device model for automation tasks
Cactus launched Needle 3, a foundation model small enough to run as a single 8-29MB binary on phones, wearables, robots, smart home hubs and cars. Built on what the company calls a Simple Attention Network, it sacrifices general chat ability to specialize in three tasks: text embedding for local search, structured data extraction from messy text, and tool calling that maps spoken requests to app functions. The company claims it outperforms models ten times larger on mobile tool calls and matches models two to three times bigger on extraction.