Recursive launches Flint, a laptop coding model largely built by AI

Recursive emerged from stealth in May with $650 million in funding at a $4.65 billion valuation, backed by GV, Nvidia, and AMD Ventures, and is led by CEO Richard Socher, Salesforce's former chief scientist. Flint is the company's first model and its first public demonstration of the Eureka Machine, which Recursive says came up with ideas, ran experiments and used the results to decide what to try next.

The Eureka Machine's contributions include a sparser model shape, low-bit training that shrank Flint by 71% with almost no loss in quality, and custom kernels, which are specialized programs that speed up underlying computations. That let a small team build the model from scratch in under four months, though Recursive did not say how much time the Eureka Machine saved its researchers.

Recursive is not alone in leaning on AI for research: OpenAI said last month that by mid-August, its AI agents were logging 3.1 workdays for every one worked by a human researcher. Recursive's longer-term goal, Socher told Wired, is for the Eureka Machine to achieve full recursive self-improvement, with humans overseeing the process and able to stop it if something goes wrong.