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Recursive (Flint)

Recursive (Recursive Superintelligence, @Recursive_SI) is an AI lab building 'recursive self-improving' research systems.

Visit recursive.com ↗@Recursive_SI on X ↗

What Recursive (Flint) does

Recursive (Recursive Superintelligence, @Recursive_SI) is an AI lab building 'recursive self-improving' research systems. It was incorporated in London, with offices in London and San Francisco. CEO Richard Socher (ex-Salesforce chief scientist, You.com founder) and co-founders include Tim Rocktäschel (UCL, ex-Google DeepMind), Alexey Dosovitskiy (ViT), Jeff Clune, Josh Tobin, Caiming Xiong, Yuandong Tian and Tim Shi. Its first and so far only public product is Flint (21 Oct 2026): an open-weight (Apache-2.0) local coding model, reported as a 40B mixture-of-experts with ~2.5B active parameters and up to 262K context. The company says it was largely built in under four months by its automated research system, the 'Eureka Machine'. Claims 125+ tokens/sec on a MacBook Pro M4 and 150+ on NVIDIA DGX/RTX Spark, and best-in-class results for its size on SWE-Bench Pro/Verified and Terminal-Bench (company benchmarks).

Good for

  • Private, offline coding help on a laptop for client code that can't leave the machine
  • Cheap, unmetered model for small agent jobs (refactors, tests) via Ollama/LM Studio or opencode

Try this in 10 minutes

  1. Private, offline coding help on a laptop for client code that can't leave the machine. Use the free version: pick one real example from your own business and try just that.
  2. Cheap, unmetered model for small agent jobs (refactors, tests) via Ollama/LM Studio or opencode. Put the result next to how you do it today. Is it faster, cheaper or better?
  3. Sign up (free plan or trial if available) and try it on one real task from this week.

Mini-tasks based on common small-business uses for this tool.

Honest take

Some claims not independently checked

  • Sources: recursive.com/updates/introducing-recursive-flint, huggingface.co/RecursiveSI/flint, TechCrunch 21 Oct.
  • Benchmarks are self-reported.
  • Company check: @Recursive_SI (id 2052840135335837696, business-verified, links recursive.com) is the company account, so this entry is the company-level Recursive entry; no duplicate created.
  • Timeline from its posts and press: emerged from stealth on 13 May 2026 with a $650M round at a $4.65B valuation led by GV and Greycroft, with AMD Ventures and NVIDIA (Tech.eu, The Decoder, TechCrunch, GV).
  • It published 'First Steps Toward Automated AI Research' (X Article, 11 Jun 2026).
  • In Aug 2026 its automated research found and helped fix inference-performance edge cases in vLLM and SGLang (via co-founder Josh Tobin).
  • Flint launched on 21 Oct 2026, trained on NVIDIA GB300 NVL72.
  • 'Superintelligence' and '50,000 PhDs' are aspirations, not products.
  • No paid product or API yet; the company teased 'stay tuned' for more.
  • UK angle: a London-incorporated lab.

What we couldn’t verify

  • Fact vs hype: the funding and team are well documented.
  • Flint's speed and benchmark claims are self-reported, though WIRED's Will Knight gave a positive hands-on quote.

Pricing

Free open weights (Hugging Face, Apache-2.0); needs capable hardware (INT4 ~23GB on Apple Silicon)

Prices as listed by the maker when we last checked (2026-10-22); usually in US dollars. Check the website for current prices.

Latest update

  • 2026-10-21: launched Flint, open-weight local coding model (first model, built with the Eureka Machine); earlier: emerged from stealth 13 May 2026 with $650M at a $4.65B valuation.
  • : Confirmed @Recursive_SI is the company behind Flint and made the entry company-level: London/SF lab led by Richard Socher with Tim Rocktäschel and others, $650M raise at $4.65B (May 2026), automated-research work (June article, vLLM/SGLang fixes in Aug), first model Flint on 21 Oct.

Is Recursive (Flint) worth it? Quick answers

Is Recursive (Flint) worth it?

Recursive (Flint) is worth a look if it matches a job you already do (Frontier lab / LLM). It is free or open source, so the main cost is your time to set it up. Some of the maker's claims have not been independently checked.

How much does Recursive (Flint) cost?

Free open weights (Hugging Face, Apache-2.0); needs capable hardware (INT4 ~23GB on Apple Silicon)

What is Recursive (Flint) used for?

Recursive (Recursive Superintelligence, @Recursive_SI) is an AI lab building 'recursive self-improving' research systems. Typical uses: private, offline coding help on a laptop for client code that can't leave the machine; cheap, unmetered model for small agent jobs (refactors, tests) via Ollama/LM Studio or opencode.