US Startup Recursive Releases Flint: A Laptop Coding Model It Says Was Largely Built by AI
Recursive launches Flint, an open-source coding model for laptops, claiming its development was significantly assisted by its internal AI research system.
US-based AI startup Recursive released its first public model, Flint, on October 21. The company describes Flint as an open-source coding model designed for laptops, stating that its development was "largely built with the help of AI."
A key feature of Flint is the tool used to create it: Recursive's "Eureka Machine." According to TechCrunch, this automated research system contributed to nearly every step of the model's creation, from pre-training to post-training, enabling a small team to build the model from scratch in under four months. This release serves as an early public test of "recursive self-improvement," the concept of using AI to build better AI.
Technically, Flint is a mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion total parameters, but only 2.5 billion are active for any given task. This architecture makes it lightweight enough to run on ordinary laptops. In contrast, Meta's Muse Spark Open, an open model released last week for Macs, uses 816 billion parameters and requires at least a terabyte of memory.
Recursive's benchmark data indicates that Flint generates approximately 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with an Apple M4 Pro chip, roughly twice the speed of similar models like Google's Gemma 4 and Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on the same hardware. On SWE-Bench Verified, a benchmark measuring real-world software bug fixing, Flint outperformed other models under 50 billion parameters. However, these performance figures are vendor-reported and have not yet been independently verified at scale.
Flint is available for free download on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license, allowing for commercial use and modification. Because the model runs locally on user devices rather than cloud servers, developers can work offline, maintain code privacy, and avoid usage fees associated with AI cloud services.