NEEDLE

Summary from the TLDR DevOps newsletter

Cactus Compute has released Needle 2, an open 45-million-parameter model for tool calling, device use, and structured data extraction. The entire model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in about 28MB of RAM. On benchmarks, it trades wins with models 5x to 70x larger, including FunctionGemma 270M, LFM2.5 230M, and Apple FM, while running at 2-bit quantization against their 16-bit versions. It installs via pip and supports LoRA fine-tuning, with weights available on Hugging Face.