🦜 Macaw
The assistant your Mac should have shipped with.
Ask for something in plain English and Macaw does it — sends the email, finds the file, reads the PDF, tells you what's eating your battery. It runs entirely on your Mac. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is logged, and there is no account to make.
Available today. Not a waitlist.
What you can say to it
"email ada the q3 numbers and tell her i approved"
"why is my mac slow?"
"read ~/Documents/contract.pdf and summarise it in two sentences"
"take a screenshot, make a folder called Shots, and move it there"
"what's on my screen?"
"am i free tomorrow afternoon?"
"find my biggest files"
It chains steps on its own. "Take a screenshot, make a folder, move it there" is three actions from one sentence, and it checks each one worked before moving to the next.
What it can reach
97 tools, each one hand-written and tested — not a scrape of every command macOS exposes.
| ✉️ Mail | send, search, reply, unread counts, senders |
| 📅 Calendar | create events, today's schedule, free slots, next meeting's video link |
| 📁 Files | Spotlight search, open, move, folder sizes, biggest files, old downloads |
| 📝 Notes & Reminders | create, append, search, complete, overdue |
| 🎵 Music | play, pause, skip, by artist, by playlist, shuffle |
| 🌐 Safari & Chrome | current tab, all tabs, open, search |
| 🖥️ System | battery, disk, wifi, brightness, dark mode, volume, focus, lock, sleep |
| 👀 Screen | read what's on screen, record it, screenshot it |
| 📄 Documents | read and summarise PDFs, Word files, code, plain text |
| ⚡️ Diagnostics | what's using CPU, what's eating memory, battery health |
Private by construction
Not a policy — an architecture. The model weighs 1.5 GB and lives on your machine. There is no server to send anything to.
- No cloud, no API keys, no account
- No telemetry, no analytics, no crash reporting
- Works on a plane
- Your mail, files and calendar never leave the device
Specs
| Size | 2.7B parameters · 1.5 GB on disk (4-bit) |
| Memory | ~2 GB while running |
| Speed | ~1.2 s per request on an M2 |
| Context | 128K tokens |
| Requires | Apple Silicon (M1 or later), macOS 14+ |
Two builds:
Macaw-4bit-MLX— 1.5 GB, what the app runs. Start here.Macaw(this repo) — 5.4 GB BF16, for fine-tuning or serving on a GPU.
Run it yourself
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch
tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("badtheorylabs/Macaw")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("badtheorylabs/Macaw",
dtype=torch.bfloat16)
messages = [
{"role": "system", "content": "You are Macaw, an on-device assistant running on this Mac."},
{"role": "user", "content": "what's my battery at?"},
]
inputs = tok.apply_chat_template(messages, add_generation_prompt=True,
return_dict=True, return_tensors="pt")
out = model.generate(inputs["input_ids"], max_new_tokens=128)
print(tok.decode(out[0][inputs["input_ids"].shape[1]:], skip_special_tokens=True))
Pass your tools with tools=[...] and it replies with a call:
<|tool_call_start|>[battery_status()]<|tool_call_end|>
The app in github.com/Badtheorylabs/Macaw handles the rest — parsing, running, and asking before anything destructive.
Measured
On an Apple M2, 4-bit build:
| Tool-call accuracy | 10 / 10 on the capability suite |
| Request latency | 1.21 s mean · 0.77 s best |
| Decode | ~40 tok/s |
Method and harness are in the GitHub repo.
model.safetensors SHA-256
966d206651b96446f6a4c415d118049f478a8df79be3fa45bfd04959a4d68be0
License
Weights derive from LFM2.5-2.6B under the LFM Open License v1.0. Redistribution keeps that license and Liquid AI's attribution. Commercial use is free below $10M annual revenue. The app and tooling are MIT.
© 2026 Bad Theory Labs