Cactus Needle

Needle is an experimental 26-million-parameter function-calling model designed to run on extremely small devices such as phones, watches, glasses, and low-power personal AI hardware. It is based on a Simple Attention Network architecture and was distilled from a much larger model to focus on fast, compact tool-use behavior. The project provides open weights, training details, dataset generation resources, and a playground for testing the model with custom tools. Needle is optimized for single-shot function calling rather than broad conversational ability, so its core use case is selecting the right tool and producing structured arguments. It can be fine-tuned locally, including on consumer machines, which makes it useful for experimentation with small personalized agents. The project is best suited for researchers and developers exploring tiny AI models, edge inference, and lightweight tool-calling systems.