- Recursive has released Flint, a coding model that can be downloaded for free. It runs directly on the user's computer instead of in an internet cloud, and according to the source it can be used offline and does not require sending code to external servers.
- Flint is designed to use only 2.5 billion of its 40 billion total parameters at a time. The company said its in-house automated research system, 'Eureka Machine', helped with nearly every stage of model development, and that a small team built it from scratch in 4 months. This is the company's claim.
- In the company's own tests, Flint generated about 131 tokens (text fragments) per second on a MacBook Pro (Apple M4 Pro chip). That is about twice the 58 to 69 tokens per second that similar models produced on the same device. This figure was also measured by the company itself.
- Wired reporter Will Knight tried building small programs, such as a to-do list app, on a 48GB memory Mac and reported that it mostly handled the requests well. However, the company also said it is better to split large tasks into smaller steps.
O: If your development machine is old or cloud usage fees are a burden, a student writing short scripts on a laptop over the weekend may want to consider it as a free option to download and test offline.
X: 131The token speed and SWE-Bench scores are figures the Recursive team reported from its own tests, so it is safer to check independent reproduction results separately before trusting them.