Recursive releases Flint
On 21 October 2026 Recursive released Flint, a mixture-of-experts coding model with 40 billion parameters in total and 2.5 billion active per token, built to run on a laptop. The weights are on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 licence, with a small inference engine, rec. The company says its own system for automated AI research, the Eureka Machine, helped develop nearly every part of the model-building stack, and that a small team of people and agents built Flint from scratch in under four months.
Why it matters
Two things make this more than another small open model. The weights and the engine were public on the day: the Hugging Face repository and the rec repository on GitHub were both created on 21 October, both under Apache 2.0, and the repository's tensors total about 39.8 billion parameters, as announced. And Recursive says an automated research system did much of the work, from architecture search to quantization and kernels. The speed and benchmark claims are the company's own; no independent measurement was read.
What the release page says. Flint is a mixture-of-experts model for agentic coding on local hardware, with context up to 512k tokens (256k recommended). Recursive's Eureka Machine, a system that proposes, implements and tests research ideas in a loop, is said to have started from a baseline of 35 billion parameters with 3 billion active and settled on the 40 billion / 2.5 billion architecture; to have quantized the output layer to 4 bits and recovered accuracy with an offline distillation stage (the NVFP4 model scores within 0.7 points of the 16-bit one on Recursive's own benchmarks); and to have written kernels for Apple Silicon and NVIDIA RTX Spark, including a Metal kernel that fuses the whole decode pass. Recursive says Flint generates more than 125 tokens per second on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro and more than 150 on a 64 GB RTX Spark at short contexts, and leads mixture-of-experts models under 50 billion parameters on SWE-Bench Pro v2, Terminal-Bench 2.1 and SWE-Bench Verified. The page adds that Flint "may need more guidance than the larger closed-source coding models". Dates and checks. The release page carries no date; the company's updates index lists it under 21 October 2026, OpenHands (a launch partner) published its own post on 21 October 2026, and the platforms' metadata agree: the Hugging Face repository RecursiveSI/flint was created at 14:20 UTC and recursive-oss/rec on GitHub at 15:35 UTC on 21 October. What the record does not claim. All benchmark rankings, speeds and the role of the Eureka Machine are Recursive's description of its own work; no independent evaluation or reproduction was read, and "built with automated research" has not been measured by any outside party.