Benchmarked Needle 26M vs Qwen3-0.6B on CPU function calling, 50 queries across 5 difficulty tiers. The 23x smaller model wins on accuracy and is 4.4x faster.

In three linesCPU benchmark of Needle (26M) vs Qwen3-0.6B on function calling: 50 queries across 5 difficulty tiers. Needle wins on accuracy (72% vs 56% tool_match) and latency (10.9s vs 47.9s). Needle fails on tool selection, Qwen3 on tag emission. Qwen3 dominates on multilingual queries (Hindi, French).

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified