Cactus Compute

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.

Cactus Compute has released Needle 3, a foundation model compressed to 8-29 MB that runs entirely on-device for tool calling, structured data extraction, and text embedding. The company claims it beats models 10x its size on mobile tool calls while running on hardware as small as microcontrollers.