Recursive releases Flint, a free coding model that runs on a laptop
Flint activates 2.5 billion of its 40 billion parameters at a time, ships under Apache 2.0, and was built in under four months with help from the company's automated research system.
Recursive, the startup led by CEO Richard Socher, Salesforce's former chief scientist, released its first model, Flint, on October 21, TechCrunch reports. Flint is a mixture-of-experts coding model that uses "just 2.5 billion of its 40 billion settings, known as parameters, at a time," small enough for an ordinary laptop. It is "free to download on Hugging Face" under the Apache 2.0 license. The company says its automated research system, the Eureka Machine, helped with nearly every step, which "let a small team build the model from scratch in under four months."
How it compares
On SWE-Bench Verified, "Flint outperformed other models under 50 billion parameters," and on Recursive's own average across six tests, "only one model, Alibaba's Qwen3.8 27B, scored higher than Flint." In Recursive's tests it generated about 131 tokens per second on a MacBook Pro with an M4 Pro chip. The company also acknowledged that Flint needs more guidance than the large paid coding assistants and suggested breaking big tasks into smaller steps.
Why it matters
A model that runs on the developer's own machine has no per-token bill and keeps code off third-party servers. It will not replace a frontier assistant for large changes, but routine edits and small programs are where much of a team's token spend goes. If you pay per seat or per token for coding assistants, a local model for the easy work is now a realistic comparison to run.