Cactus Compute · Tiny Device Model

Needle 3

Since Week 33 2026, when this archive covered Needle 2. Needle 3 is an automation model for tiny devices at 29 to 121M parameters using laddered simple attention networks with CQ2 quantisation, packaged at 8 to 29MB for mobile, wearables, robots, smart home, automotive and microcontrollers. The new mechanism is intelligence laddering: one set of weights yields a usable model at any depth from 2 to 20 layers. Cactus claims a 4-layer tuned version passes DeepSeek V4 Flash on structured tasks and beats models ten times its size on mobile tool calls, at 400 to 4,000 tokens a second decode on a Raspberry Pi 5. No licence or release date stated on the page.