What happened
- Recursive, Richard Socher’s company, released Flint on October 21, 2026, its first model, aimed at agentic coding on local hardware.
- It is a mixture-of-experts model with 40 billion parameters in total, of which it activates 2.5 billion per token.
- Recursive says its “Eureka Machine,” an automated research system, helped develop almost the whole process: data, training recipes, infrastructure and inference optimization. A small team did it in under four months.
- The company reports more than 125 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro and more than 150 on a 64 GB NVIDIA RTX Spark. According to TechCrunch, it is available on Hugging Face under an Apache 2.0 license.
Why it matters
- A model that fits on a laptop changes the cost and privacy equation: the code never leaves the machine, it works offline and there is no charge per text processed.
- For a Chilean software company with contracts that forbid sending code to foreign clouds, that is the difference between being able to use an assistant or not.
- The comparisons are the company’s own: it says it leads mixture-of-experts models under 50 billion parameters on tests such as SWE-Bench Pro v2 and Terminal-Bench 2.1. Independent verification is missing.
The number
2.5 billion of 40 billion. Parameters Flint activates per token, the reason it runs on a laptop.
Context
Recursive came out of stealth in May with US$650 million in funding and a US$4.65 billion valuation, with GV, Nvidia and AMD Ventures among its backers, according to TechCrunch. Flint is presented as an early test of recursive self-improvement, the idea that AI builds better AI, with people supervising the process.
What’s next
- Independent tests of the results the company published.
- No dates for new Recursive models.
Bottom line
Open models are multiplying and competing on infrastructure: Xiaomi released MiMo-V2.6 with open weights, DeepSeek opened the engine that serves its models and AWS let PyTorch code run on its Trainium chips.
Sources
- Recursive — Introducing Flint (company announcement, October 21, 2026)
- TechCrunch — Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI (October 21, 2026)
- Cover image: Crew crew, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Edited by Rodrigo Cornejo. How we select and verify: who writes these notes.
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