Recursive releases Flint, an open weight local coding model it says it built in under four months with its automated research system, the Eureka Machine
Recursive Flint is here: our first model, built with the Eureka Machine. Fast, local coding. Open weights available on Hugging Face.
Context
It is a test of AI doing much of the work of building AI, and it gives developers a fast coding model that runs on their own machines.
Recursive is a startup led by chief executive Richard Socher, formerly chief scientist at Salesforce, that aims to build AI that improves itself. WIRED reported it has raised $650 million at a $4.65 billion valuation. Its benchmark and speed figures are its own.
Deep dive
On October 21, Recursive posted that Recursive Flint is here, its first model, built with the Eureka Machine, for fast local coding, with open weights on Hugging Face. It quoted chief executive Richard Socher, who said Flint is best in class for fast local coding, up to twice as fast as comparable models at more than 125 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro and more than 150 on an RTX Spark, and was built from scratch in under four months.
Recursive's announcement says Flint is a mixture of experts model with 40 billion total parameters and 2.5 billion active per token. It claims Flint leads mixture of experts models under 50 billion parameters on SWE Bench Pro v2, Terminal Bench 2.1 and SWE Bench Verified, and rivals dense models of 25 to 40 billion parameters while running more than five times faster. Ollama lists Recursive's own scores of 54.9% on Terminal Bench 2.1 and 74.2% on SWE Bench Verified. The weights are under the Apache 2.0 license.
The speed figures are at short contexts, using Recursive's own inference engine. Recursive says the Eureka Machine helped build nearly every part of the stack, from data and training recipes to inference code.
WIRED's Will Knight tested Flint and called it fast and very capable. Socher told WIRED the goal is full recursive self improvement overseen by humans, an idea critics warn is risky. A digest noted the weights were not yet visible on Hugging Face early on October 21.
What to expect next
Watch for independent benchmark runs of Flint on SWE Bench and Terminal Bench, and for speed tests on other hardware and longer contexts. Developers trying it in local coding tools will show whether it holds up against larger models. Also watch what Recursive says about the Eureka Machine's role, and whether lawmakers pushing to restrict recursive self improvement take note.