• 45M
  • Params
  • 800+ tok/s
  • Pi5 prefill
  • 500+ tok/s
  • Pi5 decode
  • CQ2-bit
  • Compression
  • 14 MB
  • File size
  • 28 MB
  • Session RAM Our Bet Bringing On-Device AI to <200Devices:EdgeAIhaslatelymeantMacsandPCs,buttheedgeismostlycheaphardware:over21billionconnectedIoTdevicesagainstroughly1.5billionPCs,andinemergingmarketsmostphonesshipunder200 Devices: Edge AI has lately meant Macs and PCs, but the edge is mostly cheap hardware: over 21 billion connected IoT devices against roughly 1.5 billion PCs, and in emerging markets most phones ship under 200. Count budget phones, Raspberry Pis, microcontrollers, wearables, small robots like Reachy Mini, and connected home devices, and roughly four in five edge devices cost under $200. That is the hardware Needle targets: no GPU, no NPU, a few hundred MB of RAM. Function Call & Device Use: Turning on a light does not need a frontier model. A watch, a home, a robot: each already exposes its abilities as functions with typed parameters, so the only hard part is mapping a messy sentence onto them: which function, with which values. Framed that way, the problem needs no world knowledge and no open-ended prose, which is why 45M parameters suffice where chat needs billions. That smaller formulation is the bet everything else follows from. Extraction & Structured Outputs: The schema is the interface, and the same formulation covers documents: a schema plus a paragraph returns typed fields, an enum field is a classifier, an array field collects a list in one call. We enforce this with a contract, not a convention: every turn is answered with a call envelope, the empty call is the refusal, and a byte-level grammar compiled from the declared schemas constrains every token. The grammar carries the syntax, so all 45M parameters go to choosing functions and grounding arguments in the user's words. Edge-Cloud Collaboration: No small model covers everything, so Needle says so instead of guessing: every response carries a learned confidence score, and off-topic requests return the empty call. Above your threshold, act; below it, re-ask or escalate to the cloud. Most device requests are routine control, so...