[Digital Today reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] AI startup Recursive, founded last year, has unveiled Flint, a free coding model that runs on laptops, TechCrunch reported on Tuesday. The company said it carried out most of Flint’s development using AI.

According to the report, Recursive’s automated research system, Eureka Machine, took part in nearly the entire process of developing Flint. That led to a small team building the model from scratch in less than four months.

Eureka Machine generates ideas, runs experiments, reviews results and decides the next attempt. TechCrunch reported that the system also found a training method that cut the model’s size by 71 percent while keeping quality largely intact.

Recursive emerged publicly in May after raising $650 million at a valuation of $4.65 billion. Richard Socher (리처드 소처), a former chief scientist at Salesforce, is CEO.

Flint runs on users’ computers rather than the company’s cloud servers. Developers can use it without an internet connection and do not have to send code outside. There are no charges based on usage. The model can be downloaded for free on Hugging Face.

Flint uses 2.5 billion parameters for each task out of 40 billion total parameters. That allows it to run without strain on a typical laptop.

In an evaluation that measures the ability to fix real software bugs, it received the highest score among models with fewer than 50 billion parameters.

Recursive acknowledged that using Flint requires more guidance than large paid coding AI tools. It recommended breaking big tasks into smaller steps and assigning them one by one.

Recursive has also set as a goal “recursive self-improvement,” in which AI makes better AI, and that AI in turn makes better AI. Socher told Wired, "We will achieve this in a state where humans supervise the process and can stop it if problems arise."