The model that fits on a Raspberry Pi
A 2.6-billion-parameter model doing agentic work on a forty-dollar computer is not competing with the frontier. It is competing with there being nothing on the device at all.
Liquid AI's LFM2.5-2.6B runs agentic workloads on local hardware from phones and laptops down to a Raspberry Pi — no cloud, no GPU.
Agentic is the distinguishing word
Small models have run locally for years. What they generally have not done is tool use, structured output and multi-step planning reliably enough to drive an agent loop without falling over.
Targeting that specifically is a different objective from compressing a chat model, and it changes what the model is optimised for: schema adherence and recovery from a failed call, rather than fluency.
What no-cloud actually removes
No per-token cost. No network dependency. No data leaving the device. And no vendor able to deprecate the model underneath a shipped product — which is the one nobody lists and everybody who has been burned remembers.
For a device manufacturer, a model you can put in firmware is a fundamentally different object from a model you rent.
The honest ceiling
2.6 billion parameters is not competing with a 117B open-weight release on reasoning, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
The comparison it wins is against having no local capability. That is a large category — sensors, controllers, industrial equipment, anything intermittently connected — and it is a category the frontier has never addressed because the frontier cannot fit.
The curve, not the point
117B on one GPU. 21B in 16GB. 2.6B on a Raspberry Pi. Those are three points on the same line, published within weeks of each other, and the line is heading somewhere specific.
Capability is migrating to hardware that was never expected to hold it. That is a quieter story than the frontier and it will touch far more devices.
VentureBeat — Liquid AI's new model LFM2.5-2.6B brings powerful AI agents to devices as small as a Raspberry Pi → · OpenAI — gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b model card →