FUTO released the models behind their swipe keyboard — a three-component stack totalling 2.5 million parameters that achieves 26% fewer errors than Gboard on their benchmark. It trains on one workstation GPU, runs on low-end Android devices in milliseconds, and is the first freely licensed open swipe-typing model. It's a reminder that model scale is a tool, not an objective.
NVIDIA's RTX Spark puts a Blackwell GPU and full CUDA stack inside a laptop SoC — enough to run a 120B-parameter model locally with 1M-token context. At roughly the same moment, Perplexity shipped a hybrid inference orchestrator that uses a compact on-device model to automatically decide which tasks stay local and which escalate to the cloud. Together they sketch what a local-AI platform actually looks like in hardware and software.
Cactus Compute released Needle, a 26M-parameter MIT-licensed model for on-device function calling that strips out all feed-forward networks from the transformer. The architectural choice is a thesis: tool calling is retrieval-and-routing, not reasoning, and attention is the right primitive for it. The numbers are striking — 6000 tok/s prefill on consumer hardware — even if the playground has rough edges.