One of Europe’s most prominent AI startups has released two AI models that are so tiny, they have named them after a chicken’s brain and a fly’s brain.
Multiverse Computing claims these are the world’s smallest models that are still high-performing and can handle chat, speech, and even reasoning in one case.
These new tiny models are intended to be embedded into Internet of Things devices, as well as run locally on smartphones, tablets, and PCs.
“We can compress the model so much that they can fit on devices,” founder Román Orús told TechCrunch. “You can run them on premises, directly on your iPhone, or on your Apple Watch.”
As we previously reported, Multiverse Computing is a buzzy European AI startup headquartered in Donostia, Spain, with about 100 employees in offices worldwide. It was co-founded by a top European professor of quantum computers and physics, Román Orús; quantum computing expert Samuel Mugel; and Enrique Lizaso Olmos, the former deputy CEO of Unnim Banc.
It just raised €189 million (about $215 million) in June on the strength of a model compression technology it calls “CompactifAI.” (Since it was founded in 2019, it has raised about $250 million, Orús said.)
CompactifAI is a quantum-inspired compression algorithm that reduces the size of existing AI models without sacrificing those models’ performance, Orús said.
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“We have a compression technology that is not the typical compression technology that the people from computer science or machine learning will do, because we come from quantum physics,” he described. “It’s a more subtle and more refined compression algorithm.”
The company has already released a long list of compressed versions of open source models, especially popular small models like Llama 4 Scout or Mistral Small 3.1. And it just launched compressed versions of OpenAI’s two new open models. It has also compressed some very large models — it offers a DeepSeek R1 Slim, for instance.
But since it’s in the business of making models smaller, it has focused extra attention on making the smallest yet most powerful models possible.
Its two new models are so small that they can bring chat AI capabilities to just about any IoT device and work wit …