Cactus Compute ships 45M-parameter tool-calling model in 14MB

Cactus Compute released Needle 2, an open 45-million-parameter model specialized for tool calling, on-device use, and structured data extraction. The full model ships as a single 14MB binary and runs a complete session in about 28MB of RAM, requiring no GPU or NPU. It leads both splits of the Seal-Tools benchmark among models targeting this class of hardware.

Why it matters: Tool-calling and agentic workflows have mostly assumed access to large cloud models, but Needle 2 shows a sub-50M-parameter model can handle structured tool use on ordinary CPUs. That matters for edge and embedded agents — IoT devices, browser extensions, offline apps — where latency, cost, or connectivity rule out calling a frontier API. It's part of a broader trend of shrinking specialized capabilities out of general-purpose LLMs into tiny, purpose-built models.