needle alternatives
Curated alternatives to needle — and why you'd switch.
BigMoeOnEdge
Run MoE models bigger than your RAM: keep the always-needed weights resident and stream each token's experts from flash — a 284B model on a 12 GB phone, CPU only, byte-identical output.
Why switchOpposite answers to the same on-device memory ceiling. BigMoeOnEdge streams a 284B MoE's experts from flash so a phone can run a frontier model; Needle ships a 45M model purpose-built for tool calling that fits in ~28MB and never touches the network. Capability versus footprint.
Full comparison →