Recursive launches Flint, an open coding model built largely by AI

Recursive, an AI startup, released its first model, Flint, on Wednesday. Flint is a free coding model that can run on a laptop and was built largely with the help of AI, according to the company.

The company said its automated research system, called the Eureka Machine, contributed to nearly every step of Flint's development, from pre-training to post-training and inference, allowing a small team to build the model from scratch in under four months.

Flint is a mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion parameters, activating only 2.5 billion at a time, which keeps it light enough for an ordinary laptop. Recursive said low-bit training shrank the model by 71% with almost no loss in quality. The model is available for free on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

Recursive described Flint as an early public test of recursive self-improvement, the idea that AI can build better AI. 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.