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

#What happened

AI startup Recursive, led by CEO Richard Socher (Salesforce's former chief scientist), released its first model, Flint, on Wednesday, October 21. The company emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding at a $4.65 billion valuation, backed by GV, Nvidia and AMD Ventures. Flint is 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 development, letting a small team build the model from scratch in under four months. Flint is an early public test of recursive self-improvement (AI building better AI). It is a mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion total parameters and about 2.5 billion active per token, free to download on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license; Recursive reports about 131 tokens per second on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro.

#Why it matters

Recursive calls this a first public test that AI systems can improve AI itself under human oversight, and the company says a tiny team shipped a competitive local coding model in under four months. Because Flint runs on the user's own computer, developers can code offline, keep code private, and avoid cloud usage fees. Caveat reported by TechCrunch: Recursive acknowledged Flint needs more guidance than the big paid coding assistants. Verified October 22, 2026.