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

Recursive, an AI startup founded last year with $650 million in funding at a $4.65 billion valuation from backers including GV, Nvidia, and AMD Ventures, released its first model, Flint, on Wednesday. Flint is a free, open-source coding model that runs on a laptop and was built largely with the help of AI. Recursive says its automated research system, the Eureka Machine, contributed to nearly every step of Flint's development, letting a small team build the model from scratch in under four months. Flint is an early public test of recursive self-improvement, the debated idea that AI can build better AI, which in turn builds even better AI. The model is a mixture-of-experts system using just 2.5 billion of its 40 billion parameters at a time, making it light enough for an ordinary laptop and much smaller than Meta's Muse Spark Open. In Recursive's tests, Flint generated about 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with Apple's M4 Pro chip, roughly twice the speed of similar models, and outperformed other models under 50 billion parameters on SWE-Bench Verified. Recursive acknowledged Flint needs more guidance than big paid coding assistants, but early reviews were positive. Recursive did not say how much time Eureka saved its researchers, but the company previously told TechCrunch that its $410 million compute deal with Amazon Web Services in June was less about headcount and more about agent count. CEO Richard Socher told Wired the longer-term goal is for the Eureka Machine to achieve full recursive self-improvement, with humans overseeing the process and able to stop it if something goes wrong.

(Source：TechCrunch)