Recursive releases Flint, a free coding model small enough for a laptop

AI startup Recursive, led by former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, has released Flint, a coding model you can download from Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 licence. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion total parameters, using about 2.5 billion at a time. Recursive says its automated research system, called the Eureka Machine, helped with nearly every step of building it.

In the company’s own tests on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip, Flint produced roughly 131 tokens per second, about double similar models. It beat other sub-50-billion-parameter models on SWE-Bench Verified. Recursive admits it needs more guidance than large paid assistants and works best when big tasks are split into smaller steps.

For students and freshers in India, a free local coding model means practice without subscription fees or sending code to the cloud. Developers handling client code can also keep it on their own machines. Benchmarks are vendor-reported, so test it on your own projects.

Source: TechCrunch.