CPU inference

MarkTechPost published a coding guide that benchmarks Cactus Compute's 16.9 MB speech model, Cactus Whistle, against Whisper base on a CPU. The guide covers word error rate, speed, streaming latency, timestamps, keywords and speech-to-tool calls.

Liquid AI released two open-weight encoder models, LFM2.5-Encoder-230M and LFM2.5-Encoder-350M, built for classification and routing tasks at long context on CPU hardware. The company claims the smaller model runs 3.7x faster than ModernBERT-base at 8,192 tokens while matching or beating larger encoders on GLUE, SuperGLUE, and multilingual benchmarks.