Cactus Needle 3
What it is
A foundation model for phones, wearables, and microcontrollers, built for automation rather than chat: tool calls, structured extraction, and embeddings. The trick is an 'intelligence ladder' — one set of weights where every depth from 2 to 20 layers is a usable model of its own, shipped as 2-bit binaries between roughly 9 and 29 MB — so you choose accuracy versus footprint per device without training a family. Open weights on Hugging Face under Apache-2.0; Cactus sells a one-off $19 hosted fine-tune.
Featured in
Issue #14 — Scope Creep · — the full issue has that week's other tools, reads, and big-lab releases.
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