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

Recursive, an AI startup, released Flint on Wednesday, a free, laptop-sized coding model it says was largely built by its own AI research system, marking an early public test of AI that improves itself. The model is available for download on Hugging Face. Flint, built in under four months by a small team with help from Recursive’s automated Eureka Machine, runs offline on a user’s computer, avoiding cloud fees and keeping code private. It uses only 2.5 billion of its 40 billion parameters at a time, making it fast and outperforming similar-sized models on bug-fixing benchmarks. The company, led by former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding. Recursive’s long-term goal is full recursive self-improvement, with humans overseeing the process, though some researchers fear AI improving itself could slip out of control.