AI News · Models ·
Recursive releases Flint, a free laptop coding model it says AI largely built
Recursive, the startup led by former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, released its first model, Flint, a free coding model that runs on a laptop. The company says its automated research system, the Eureka Machine, helped with nearly every step of building the 40 billion parameter model.
Key points
- Flint has 40 billion parameters with 2.5 billion active and is free under Apache 2.0.
- Recursive reports about 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip.
- The company says its Eureka Machine helped with pre-training, post-training and inference.
What happened: Recursive released Flint on Wednesday, its first model, TechCrunch reported. Flint is a free coding model that runs on a laptop and is available on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. The company said a small team built it from scratch in under four months, with its Eureka Machine research system helping with nearly every step.
The details: Flint is a mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion parameters, of which 2.5 billion are active for any given task. In the company's own tests it generated about 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, compared with 58 to 69 tokens per second for similar models such as Gemma 4. Recursive says Flint beat other models under 50 billion parameters on SWE-Bench Verified. Exact scores were not reported. The company said Eureka contributed a sparser model shape, low-bit training that shrank Flint by 71% and custom kernels.
Background: Recursive emerged from stealth in May with $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation, backed by GV, Nvidia and AMD Ventures. It also signed a $410 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services in June.
Who it affects: Because Flint runs locally, developers can work offline and keep code private. Recursive says it needs more guidance than large paid coding assistants and recommends breaking big tasks into smaller steps. Training compute and cost have not been disclosed.
Our take
Flint gives teams a free, local coding assistant option that keeps code on the machine and avoids cloud usage fees, though it needs more guidance than paid tools.