Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots launched on August 10, 2026 with 537 votes, #12 of 23,274 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Needle 2 is an open-source 45-parameter language model compressed to 14MB that performs tool calling, device control, and structured data extraction. Designed for resource-constrained devices like phones, smartwatches, smart home systems, and robots, it runs full sessions in 28MB of RAM. The model achieves competitive performance on mobile benchmarks while being significantly smaller than comparable alternatives, delivering 500 tokens per second on a Raspberry Pi 5 and 300-1,500 tokens per second across various consumer devices.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A foundation model for mobile, wearables, robots, smart home, automotive and microcontrollers. One 8-29 MB binary that beats models 10x its size on mobile tool calls and matches 2-3x bigger models on extraction.
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The…
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