Cactus just dropped Mirage, a tiny 51.3M-parameter vision model compressed to roughly 22MB via 2-bit quantization. It handles scene description, object detection, OCR, segmentation masks, and spatial reasoning in a single pass—clocking 74ms on a Galaxy S26 NPU. It proves full-featured visual perception can comfortably live on device edge chips without touching the cloud.
Cactus just rolled out Needle 3, a tiny foundation model packed into a single 8–29 MB binary for smartwatches and microcontrollers. It trades general chat capacity to excel at offline tool calls and data extraction, scaling from 2 to 20 layers based on hardware limits. Why it matters: developers can now build instant, fully offline actions directly on tiny edge devices without relying on the cloud.
Cactus just rolled out Needle 2, an ultra-tiny 45M-parameter model that packs into a 14MB binary and uses only 28MB of RAM. Built for micro-devices like the Raspberry Pi 5 and sub-$200 phones, it clocks hundreds of tokens per second for local tool calling without needing a GPU.
