Needle 3

Needle 3 is an automation model from Cactus Compute, released on 18 September 2026 to run entirely on the device rather than behind an API. It is small enough to ship as a single file of 8 to 29 MB, and the same network can be deployed at several depths, so it fits a microcontroller as well as a laptop.

Main features

• Tool calls: picks the tool an agent should call and fills in its arguments.
• Structured extraction: pulls structured fields out of text.
• Text embeddings: produces embeddings of text for matching and search.
• Local running: runs without a call to an external service, on phones, wearables, cars, robots and microcontrollers.

Who it serves

Developers building on-device features for phones, wearables, smart homes, robots and other hardware the company lists.

Key facts

• Size: 121M parameters, in the company's CQ2 2-bit format.
• Licence: Apache-2.0, with weights published on Hugging Face.
• Decode speed: up to 4,000 tokens a second, the company says.
• Disputed claim: the launch claim of matching DeepSeek V4 Flash is contested, with one commenter reporting weaker tool selection than FunctionGemma on their own test.