A low-latency AI engine for mobile devices & wearables. Main features:
- Fast: fastest inference on ARM CPU
- Low RAM: zero-copy memory mapping ensures 10x lower RAM use than other engines
- Multimodal: one SDK for speech, vision, and language models
- Cloud fallback: automatically route requests to cloud models if needed
- Energy-efficient: NPU-accelerated prefill
┌─────────────────┐ │ Cactus Engine │ ←── OpenAI-compatible APIs for all major languages └─────────────────┘ Chat, vision, STT, RAG, tool call, cloud handoff │ ┌─────────────────┐ │ Cactus Graph │ ←── Zero-copy computation graph (PyTorch for mobile) └─────────────────┘ Custom models, optimised for RAM & quantisation │ ┌─────────────────┐ │ Cactus Kernels │ ←── ARM SIMD kernels (Apple, Snapdragon, Exynos, etc) └─────────────────┘ Custom attention, KV-cache quant, chunked prefill - Step 1:
brew install cactus-compute/cactus/cactus - Step 2:
cactus transcribeorcactus run
#include "cactus.h" cactus_model_t model = cactus_init( "path/to/weight/folder", "path to txt or dir of txts for auto-rag", false ); const char* messages = R"([ {"role": "system", "content": "You are a helpful assistant."}, {"role": "user", "content": "My name is Henry Ndubuaku"} ])"; const char* options = R"({ "max_tokens": 50, "stop_sequences": ["<|im_end|>"] })"; char response[4096]; int result = cactus_complete( model, // model handle messages, // JSON chat messages response, // response buffer sizeof(response), // buffer size options, // generation options nullptr, // tools JSON nullptr, // streaming callback nullptr // user data );Example response from Gemma3-270m
{ "success": true, // generation succeeded "error": null, // error details if failed "cloud_handoff": false, // true if cloud model used "response": "Hi there!", "function_calls": [], // parsed tool calls "confidence": 0.8193, // model confidence "time_to_first_token_ms": 45.23, "total_time_ms": 163.67, "prefill_tps": 1621.89, "decode_tps": 168.42, "ram_usage_mb": 245.67, "prefill_tokens": 28, "decode_tokens": 50, "total_tokens": 78 }#include "cactus.h" CactusGraph graph; auto a = graph.input({2, 3}, Precision::FP16); auto b = graph.input({3, 4}, Precision::INT8); auto x1 = graph.matmul(a, b, false); auto x2 = graph.transpose(x1); auto result = graph.matmul(b, x2, true); float a_data[6] = {1.1f, 2.3f, 3.4f, 4.2f, 5.7f, 6.8f}; float b_data[12] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12}; graph.set_input(a, a_data, Precision::FP16); graph.set_input(b, b_data, Precision::INT8); graph.execute(); void* output_data = graph.get_output(result); graph.hard_reset(); | Reference | Language | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Engine API | C | Chat completion, streaming, tool calling, transcription, embeddings, RAG, vision, VAD, vector index, cloud handoff |
| Graph API | C++ | Tensor operations, matrix multiplication, attention, normalization, activation functions |
| Python SDK | Python | Mac, Linux |
| Swift SDK | Swift | iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, Android |
| Kotlin SDK | Kotlin | Android, iOS (via KMP) |
| Flutter SDK | Dart | iOS, macOS, Android |
| Rust SDK | Rust | Mac, Linux |
| React Native | JavaScript | iOS, Android |
Model weights: Pre-converted weights for all supported models at huggingface.co/Cactus-Compute.
- All weights INT4 quantised
- LFM: 1k-prefill / 100-decode, values are prefill tps / decode tps
- LFM-VL: 256px input, values are latency / decode tps
- Parakeet: 20s audio input, values are latency / decode tps
- Missing latency = no NPU support yet
| Device | LFM 1.2B | LFMVL 1.6B | Parakeet 1.1B | VL RAM Usage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac M4 Pro | 582/100 | 0.2s/98 | 0.1s/900k+ | 76MB |
| iPad/Mac M3 | 350/60 | 0.3s/69 | 0.3s/800k+ | 70MB |
| iPhone 17 Pro | 327/48 | 0.3s/48 | 0.3s/300k+ | 108MB |
| iPhone 13 Mini | 148/34 | 0.3s/35 | 0.7s/90k+ | 1GB |
| Galaxy S25 Ultra | 255/37 | -/34 | -/250k+ | 1.5GB |
| Pixel 6a | 70/15 | -/15 | -/17k+ | 1GB |
| Galaxy A17 5G | 32/10 | -/11 | -/40k+ | 727MB |
| CMF Phone 2 Pro | - | - | - | - |
| Raspberry Pi 5 | 69/11 | 13.3s/11 | 4.5s/180k+ | 869MB |
- STT: 20s audio input on Macbook Air M3 chip
- Benchmark dataset: internal evals with production users
| Model | Params | End2End ms | Latency ms | Decode toks/sec | NPU | RTF | WER |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| UsefulSensors/moonshine-base | 61M | 361 | 182 | 262 | yes | 0.0180 | 0.1395 |
| openai/whisper-tiny | 39M | 232 | 137 | 581 | yes | 0.0116 | 0.1860 |
| openai/whisper-base | 74M | 329 | 178 | 358 | yes | 0.0164 | 0.1628 |
| openai/whisper-small | 244M | 856 | 332 | 108 | yes | 0.0428 | 0.0930 |
| openai/whisper-medium | 769M | 2085 | 923 | 49 | yes | 0.1041 | 0.0930 |
| nvidia/parakeet-ctc-0.6b | 600M | 201 | 201 | 5214285 | yes | 0.0101 | 0.0930 |
| nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v3 | 600M | 718 | 718 | 3583333 | yes | 0.0359 | 0.0465 |
| nvidia/parakeet-ctc-1.1b | 1.1B | 279 | 278 | 4562500 | yes | 0.0139 | 0.1628 |
| snakers4/silero-vad | - | - | - | - | - | - | - |
- Gemma weights are often gated on HuggingFace, needs tokens
- Run
huggingface-cli loginand input your huggingface token
| Model | Features |
|---|---|
| google/gemma-3-270m-it | completion |
| google/functiongemma-270m-it | tools |
| google/gemma-3-1b-it | completion, gated |
| google/gemma-3n-E2B-it | completion, tools |
| google/gemma-3n-E4B-it | completion, tools |
| Qwen/Qwen3-0.6B | completion, tools, embed |
| Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B | embed |
| Qwen/Qwen3.5-0.8B | vision, completion, tools, embed |
| Qwen/Qwen3-1.7B | completion, tools, embed |
| Qwen/Qwen3.5-2B | vision, completion, tools, embed |
| LiquidAI/LFM2-350M | completion, tools, embed |
| LiquidAI/LFM2-700M | completion, tools, embed |
| LiquidAI/LFM2-8B-A1B | completion, tools, embed |
| LiquidAI/LFM2.5-1.2B-Thinking | completion, tools, embed |
| LiquidAI/LFM2.5-1.2B-Instruct | completion, tools, embed |
| LiquidAI/LFM2-2.6B | completion, tools, embed |
| LiquidAI/LFM2-VL-450M | vision, txt & img embed, Apple NPU |
| LiquidAI/LFM2.5-VL-1.6B | vision, txt & img embed, Apple NPU |
| tencent/Youtu-LLM-2B | completion, tools, embed |
| nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe | embed |
| Date | Status | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| Sep 2025 | Done | Released v1 |
| Oct 2025 | Done | Chunked prefill, KVCache Quant (2x prefill) |
| Nov 2025 | Done | Cactus Attention (10 & 1k prefill = same decode) |
| Dec 2025 | Done | Team grows to +6 Research Engineers |
| Jan 2026 | Done | Apple NPU/RAM, 5-11x faster iOS/Mac |
| Feb 2026 | Done | Hybrid inference, INT4, lossless Quant (1.5x) |
| Mar 2026 | Coming | Qualcomm/Google NPUs, 5-11x faster Android |
| Apr 2026 | Coming | Mediatek/Exynos NPUs, Cactus@ICLR |
| May 2026 | Coming | Wearables & custom chips optimisations |
| Jun 2026 | Coming | Torch/JAX model transpilers |
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐ │ │ │ Step 0: if on Linux (Ubuntu/Debian) │ │ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-venv python3-pip cmake │ │ build-essential libcurl4-openssl-dev │ │ │ │ Step 1: clone and setup │ │ git clone https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus && cd cactus │ │ source ./setup │ │ │ │ Step 2: use the commands │ │──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────│ │ │ │ cactus auth manage Cloud API key │ │ --status show key status │ │ --clear remove saved key │ │ │ │ cactus run <model> opens playground (auto downloads) │ │ --precision INT4|INT8|FP16 quantization (default: INT4) │ │ --token <token> HF token (gated models) │ │ --reconvert force reconversion from source │ │ │ │ cactus transcribe [model] live mic transcription (parakeet-1.1b) │ │ --file <audio.wav> transcribe file instead of mic │ │ --precision INT4|INT8|FP16 quantization (default: INT4) │ │ --token <token> HF token (gated models) │ │ --reconvert force reconversion from source │ │ │ │ cactus download <model> downloads model to ./weights │ │ --precision INT4|INT8|FP16 quantization (default: INT4) │ │ --token <token> HuggingFace API token │ │ --reconvert force reconversion from source │ │ │ │ cactus convert <model> [dir] convert model, supports LoRA merge │ │ --precision INT4|INT8|FP16 quantization (default: INT4) │ │ --lora <path> LoRA adapter to merge │ │ --token <token> HuggingFace API token │ │ │ │ cactus build build for ARM → build/libcactus.a │ │ --apple Apple (iOS/macOS) │ │ --android Android │ │ --flutter Flutter (all platforms) │ │ --python shared lib for Python FFI │ │ │ │ cactus test run unit tests and benchmarks │ │ --model <model> default: LFM2-VL-450M │ │ --transcribe_model <model> default: moonshine-base │ │ --benchmark use larger models │ │ --precision INT4|INT8|FP16 regenerate weights with precision │ │ --reconvert force reconversion from source │ │ --no-rebuild skip building library │ │ --llm / --stt / --performance run specific test suite │ │ --ios run on connected iPhone │ │ --android run on connected Android │ │ │ │ cactus clean remove all build artifacts │ │ cactus --help show all commands and flags │ │ │ └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ - Cactus Compute, Inc. (YC S25)
- UCLA's BruinAI
- Char (YC S25)
- Yale's AI Society
- National University of Singapore's AI Society
- UC Irvine's AI@UCI
- Imperial College's AI Society
- University of Pennsylvania's AI@Penn
- University of Michigan Ann-Arbor MSAIL
- University of Colorado Boulder's AI Club
If you use Cactus in your research, please cite it as follows:
@software{cactus, title = {Cactus: AI Inference Engine for Phones & Wearables}, author = {Ndubuaku, Henry and Cactus Team}, url = {https://github.com/cactus-compute/cactus}, year = {2025} }N/B: Scroll all the way up and click the shields link for resources!
![@github-actions[bot]](https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/in/15368?s=64&v=4){kind=small}
