I could train a 1B-A200m model on an iPhone 17 Pro at ~650 tokens/sec. It will take 360 days on 20B tokens of training data and use 156KW of electricity which cost $51.

The phone will fry of course, so I wrote algorithms to run inference on your phone rather. We named it after a plant that survives in resource-constrained environments, the Cactus.

can run similar model on your Grandma’s Pixel 6a at 80 tokens/second while only draining 10% battery per hour of continuous inference and using 250MB RAM only.

I then built an agentic foundation model for tiny smart devices, its compute graph is slim like a Needle. Needle has no FFN, just 26m params of pure attention, yet matches 10-25x bigger models. It can be a better Siri/Alexa for tiny smart devices, so we spun into a company with my friend.

We did Y Combinator, and raised from FCVC (Slack, Coinbase, GitLab, Instacart etc.), Samsung Next, Oxford's Seed Fund, 6 smaller funds like Transpose (run by Garry Tan's brother), fellow YC founders, and 62 tech CTOs/VP/Dir both via syndicate and directly at DeepMind, Palantir etc.

Cactus now powers cool products you've probably heard of...I think.

6 gifted Research Engineers have joined us:

• Karen is an International Physics Olympiad Gold Medalist...says he's 22 (I don't believe him).
• Satyajit joined Fei Fei Li's Lab at Stanford at 14y, I've been accused of coddling him...he's 21!
• Justin already interned at OpenAI and published at NeurIps, this one can sell me for money...he's 19.
• Noah previously interned at Google & Microsoft, an idea machine gun...when not crashing out...he's 21.
• Jakub doesn't talk, just turns up with flawless execution, the company's John Wick...he's 22.
• Parkirat is basically my boss ATP, finally learnt to speak up, probably the best engineer...just 21.

They are all smarter than I am by sheer IQ, I've just done more things haha.

Cactus really is a tiny team, building tiny AI for tiny devices :)

• After CUDARepo, Nvidia reached out, I did 7 technical rounds, got a verbal offer, back-and-forth over YOE/pay, then I got YC.
• Did MSc at QMUL, just to work with Prof Matt Purver (Ex-Stanford Researcher on CALO), did my project/thesis with his team.
• Did BEng under Prof Onyema Uzoamaka (Rumoured first Nigerian CS grad from MIT), he taught computing archs off-head!
• Biggest career miss was a PhD Studentship at Meta FAIR.

Speaking at UCLA	The Cactus Jacks	Team dinner
I'm fit too	Cactus Jacks at YC	Cactus Pod at YC HQ

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