tool calling

SB Intuitions announced Sarashina3.2 mini thinking on October 29, the first thinking model in its from-scratch Sarashina series. It offers three levels of reasoning depth and is available by API through the free beta Sarashina service.

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.

NVIDIA has released NemotronLabs VoiceChat 11B, an 11-billion-parameter end-to-end full-duplex speech model that unifies streaming speech understanding and generation in one architecture. The model claims to be the first open full-duplex system to support live tool calling during natural conversation, with ~450ms turn-taking latency.

Liquid AI has released LFM2.5-2.6B, a 2.6B-parameter model designed to run capable tool-calling agents locally on laptops and phones. The company claims it matches or beats models up to 4x its size on instruction-following and tool-use benchmarks while running under 2.5GB of memory.

xAI has made Grok 4.3 generally available on Amazon Bedrock, marking xAI's debut as a Bedrock model provider. The multimodal model offers a 1 million token context window, configurable reasoning effort (none/low/medium/high), and runs on Bedrock's Mantle inference engine using OpenAI-compatible APIs.

Amazon Web Services has added three MiniMax models to Amazon Bedrock: M2, M2.1, and M2.5. The newest model, M2.5, uses a mixture-of-experts architecture with 230 billion total parameters and 10 billion active per token, trained specifically for agent-native execution and coding tasks.

Sakana AI has released Fugu Ultra, a multi-agent orchestration system that routes tasks across pools of underlying models rather than operating as a single monolithic model. The system supports a 1M token context window and is priced at $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens.

Amazon Web Services released technical guidance for migrating text agents to voice assistants using Amazon Nova 2 Sonic, a native speech-to-speech model that combines automatic speech recognition, reasoning, tool calling, and text-to-speech in a single bidirectional streaming interface. The model supports asynchronous tool calling and built-in voice activity detection for handling interruptions.