Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI
techcrunch ·
Recursive, an AI startup focused on self-improving systems, has released its first model, Flint, a coding assistant designed to run locally on laptops. The model was developed largely by Recursive's automated research system, known as the Eureka Machine, which assisted in nearly every stage of creation and allowed a small team to build it in under four months. Flint is a mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion parameters but only activates 2.5 billion at a time, making it lightweight enough for consumer hardware while maintaining high performance. It offers significant speed advantages over competitors like Google’s Gemma 4 and Nvidia’s Nemotron 3.5, generating tokens twice as fast on comparable devices. Available for free under an Apache 2.0 license on Hugging Face, Flint allows developers to keep their code private and work offline without cloud usage fees. Early benchmarks show Flint outperforming other models under 50 billion parameters on software engineering tasks, with positive initial reviews from testers. This launch serves as an early public test of recursive self-improvement, where AI helps build better AI under human oversight. Recursive aims to eventually achieve full autonomous improvement, with each new model enhancing the Eureka Machine's research capabilities.
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