Tether's Tiny AI Agent Beats Models 2.5 Times Its Size at Controlling Your Phone

In brief

• Tether's new 800-million-parameter BotPsy AI agent outperformed models 2.5 times larger on five of six tool-use benchmarks in company testing.
• The model can manage multi-step tasks involving phone settings, messaging and scheduling, potentially without sending personal information to cloud servers.
• BotPsy expands Tether's QVAC ecosystem, which already includes local AI models for medical applications, translation and speech processing.

Tether, the company behind the world's largest stablecoin, USDT, is getting surprisingly good at making tiny AI models punch above their weight.

The company on Wednesday unveiled QVAC BotPsy, an 800-million-parameter AI agent designed to carry out everyday tasks on personal devices. Parameters are essentially the knobs that determine how much an AI model can do, and more of them generally translate to improved performance. And for reference, frontier AI models today run in the trillions of parameters.

In the company's own testing, Tether’s relatively tiny model outperformed competitors with up to 2.5 times as many parameters, suggesting that AI assistants may not need enormous models to get things done.

Unlike traditional chatbots that simply respond to questions, BotPsy is agentic, meaning it’s designed to take action. It can identify which tools an application needs, execute commands in the right order, and adjust when something goes wrong.