Needle is an experimental 26m parameter Simple Attention Network distilled from Gemini 3.1, designed to redefine tiny AI for consumer devices like phones, watches, and glasses. It specializes in single-shot function calling, outperforming larger models such as FunctionGemma-270m and Qwen-0.6B in that specific domain. The project provides fully open weights, dataset generation methods, and tools for local finetuning on consumer hardware.
* 26m parameter architecture optimized for extremely small devices.
* High performance prefill and decode speeds when running on Cactus.
* Pretrained on 200B tokens and post-trained for function calling.
* Support for local finetuning via a web UI playground or CLI.