{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-10-22T13:31:00+02:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-21-recursive-flint-eureka-machine/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-21-recursive-flint-eureka-machine/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2026-10-21-recursive-flint-eureka-machine","date":"2026-10-21","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Recursive releases Flint, an open-weight 40B-A2.5B local coding model largely developed by its automated research system, the Eureka Machine","deck":null,"takeaway":"Recursive, Richard Socher's lab, released Flint on Oct 21, 2026: an Apache-2.0 mixture-of-experts coding model (39.8B total, ~2.5B active) that runs on a laptop at 125–150 tokens/s.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Recursive: Introducing Recursive Flint","url":"https://www.recursive.com/updates/introducing-recursive-flint","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"recursive.com"},{"n":2,"title":"Hugging Face: RecursiveSI/flint model card","url":"https://huggingface.co/RecursiveSI/flint","type":"docs","group":"primary","domain":"huggingface.co"},{"n":3,"title":"Richard Socher on X (2.8M views)","url":"https://x.com/RichardSocher/status/2112944385415426249","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"x.com"},{"n":4,"title":"TechCrunch: Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model it says was largely built by AI","url":"https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/21/recursive-launches-flint-a-laptop-coding-model-it-says-was-largely-built-by-ai/","type":"press","group":"press","domain":"techcrunch.com"}],"official":3,"filed":"2026-10-22","updated":"2026-10-22","orgs":["Recursive"],"title":"Recursive releases Flint, an open-weight 40B-A2.5B local coding model largely developed by its automated research system, the Eureka Machine","summary":"Recursive, Richard Socher's lab, released Flint on Oct 21, 2026: an Apache-2.0 mixture-of-experts coding model (39.8B total, ~2.5B active) that runs on a laptop at 125–150 tokens/s. The company says its automated research system, the Eureka Machine, contributed to nearly every stage of development, from pretraining to kernels, and that a small team built it in under four months. It is the first released model a lab presents as largely built by AI research automation.","key_facts":["Architecture (model card): decoder-only MoE, 39.8B total parameters, ~2.5B active per token; 49 layers (2 dense + 47 MoE), 256 routed experts with 6 selected plus a shared expert; 35 sliding-window (513-token) and 14 full-attention layers; 262,144-token context; knowledge cutoff June 2026","Benchmarks (Recursive): 54.9% Terminal-Bench 2.1, 89.7% SWE-bench Pro v2, 74.2% SWE-bench Verified; best SWE-bench Verified among models under 50B parameters per TechCrunch; only Qwen3.8 27B scored higher on Recursive's six-test average","Speed: ~131 tokens/s on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro (about 2x Gemma 4 and Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on the same machine), 150+ on RTX Spark","Recursive blog: 'Our small team of people and agents built it from scratch in under four months'; the Eureka Machine 'helped develop nearly every part of Flint's model-building stack, from data and training recipes to infrastructure and inference optimization'","Eureka Machine contributions (per Recursive via TechCrunch): sparser model shape, low-bit training (71% smaller with almost no quality loss), custom kernels; Recursive did not say how much researcher time it saved","License and access: Apache 2.0; Hugging Face RecursiveSI/flint (BF16, ~80 GB) plus int4 and NVFP4 GGUF variants; free on OpenCode and pi.dev","Company: founded 2025, CEO Richard Socher (ex-Salesforce chief scientist); $650M at $4.65B valuation (May 2026; GV, Nvidia, AMD Ventures); $410M AWS compute deal (June)","Reach: Socher's launch post 2.8M views"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["open-weights","coding","local-models","moe","ai-rd-automation","recursive-self-improvement"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nRecursive, which emerged from stealth in May with the stated long-term goal of supervised recursive self-improvement, shipped its first\nmodel. Flint targets fast, private coding on local hardware and comes with open weights. Recursive credits the Eureka Machine, a\nsystem that proposes ideas, runs experiments and picks next steps, with most of the development work, under human supervision.\n\nTechCrunch notes Recursive recommends breaking big tasks into smaller steps, and that the current system is a supervised research\nassistant, far from the open-ended self-improvement some researchers fear. A hands-on WIRED review is\ncited only through TechCrunch's summary (not opened here).\n\n## Why it matters\n\nAI-automated AI R&D has been a central concern in lab risk reports. Flint is a concrete, downloadable product whose makers say an AI\nsystem did most of the research, which makes the claim testable by outsiders.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2026-06-04-anthropic-when-ai-builds-itself","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-06-04-anthropic-when-ai-builds-itself/","date":"2026-06-04","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Anthropic's 'When AI builds itself'","deck":"Claude writes 80%+ of merged code, engineers ship 8x more; Anthropic would join a verifiable multi-lab pause","takeaway":"It is the clearest statement by a frontier lab that recursive self-improvement is a near-term planning case, together with a concrete, conditional pause offer.","category":"policy-safety","category_label":"Policy & safety","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":4,"official":1,"filed":"2026-10-09","updated":"2026-10-09","orgs":["Anthropic","Anthropic Institute"]}],"people":[{"id":"richard-socher","name":"Richard Socher","url":"https://postcutoff.com/person/richard-socher/"}],"posts":[{"id":"2026-10-21-richardsocher-introducing-flint","title":"Richard Socher introduces Flint, Recursive's first model, built with the Eureka Machine","url":"https://postcutoff.com/p/2026-10-21-richardsocher-introducing-flint/"}],"videos":[],"models":[{"id":"recursive-flint","name":"Recursive Flint","url":"https://postcutoff.com/m/recursive-flint/"}],"changes":[{"date":"2026-10-22","type":"filed","text":"Created (X)"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-10-22","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-10-22","human_review":null,"version":null},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":174,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":113,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"gemini-4-argon","name":"Gemini 4 Argon","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":204,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":143,"in_training_data":false}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/recursive-flint-open-weight"}