Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI

Recursive released Flint, a free open-source coding model designed to run locally on ordinary laptops. The startup says its automated AI research system, the Eureka Machine, contributed to nearly every stage of development, allowing a small human team to build Flint from scratch in under four months. Flint is available on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license and can operate offline, helping developers keep code private and avoid cloud-model usage fees. Flint uses a mixture-of-experts design with 40 billion total parameters but activates 2.5 billion for each task. Recursive says it generated about 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, versus 58 to 69 tokens per second for comparable models in its tests, and exceeded 150 tokens per second on Nvidia RTX Spark hardware. The company says Flint led models under 50 billion parameters on SWE-Bench Verified and ranked second to Alibaba’s Qwen3.8 27B across six internal tests. Recursive emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding at a $4.65 billion valuation. CEO Richard Socher said the company ultimately aims for human-supervised recursive self-improvement, in which newer models help the Eureka Machine develop subsequent models faster. Recursive says Eureka helped reduce Flint’s size by 71% through low-bit training with almost no quality loss.