Recursive Releases Flint, a Laptop-Sized Coding Model Largely Built by Its Own Eureka Machine
On Wednesday, Recursive, an AI startup established in 2025, unveiled its inaugural model, Flint. This free coding model, developed with AI support, was created in less than four months utilizing the Eureka Machine. Flint enables offline functionality, ensures code confidentiality, and eliminates usage fees, and is available for download on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. It activates 2.5 billion of its total 40 billion parameters, surpassing competitors like Google’s Gemma 4. In performance tests, Flint produced approximately 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro. Emerging from stealth mode in May, Recursive secured $650 million in funding, achieving a valuation of $4.65 billion under the leadership of CEO Richard Socher, with aspirations for recursive self-improvement under human guidance.
Key facts
- Recursive released Flint, a free coding model that runs on a laptop, on Wednesday
- The Eureka Machine, Recursive's automated research system, contributed to nearly every step of Flint's development
- A small team built Flint from scratch in under four months
- Recursive emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding at a $4.65 billion valuation from backers including GV, Nvidia and AMD Ventures
- CEO Richard Socher is Salesforce's former chief scientist
- Flint is free on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license
- Flint activates 2.5 billion of its 40 billion parameters at a time as a mixture-of-experts model
- Flint generated about 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with Apple's M4 Pro chip, versus 58 to 69 for comparable models
- Meta's Muse Spark Open, released last week, uses 816 billion parameters and needs at least a terabyte of memory
- On SWE-Bench Verified, Flint outperformed other models under 50 billion parameters
- Low-bit training shrank Flint by 71% with almost no loss in quality
- Recursive signed a $410 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services in June
Entities
Artists
- Richard Socher
- Will Knight
- Jeff Clune
Institutions
- Recursive
- Eureka Machine
- GV
- Nvidia
- AMD Ventures
- Salesforce
- Hugging Face
- Meta
- Alibaba
- OpenAI
- Amazon Web Services
- Apple
- Wired
- TechCrunch
- Google Ventures
- Greycroft
- Anthropic
- Microsoft
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Virginia
- University of British Columbia
- Congress
Locations
- United States