Flint: a free coding model for laptops, built mostly by AI
Startup Recursive released Flint, a free coding model small enough for a laptop. The company says it was built largely by its own AI research system. It calls this an early test of AI that improves itself.
On Reddit's LocalLLaMA forum, users say Flint has 40 billion parameters but only 2.5 billion are active at a time. This 'mixture of experts' design makes it fast on normal hardware. In the company's own tables, it beats the popular Qwen3.6-35B on coding benchmarks. Users are now testing it themselves, so wait for real reviews.
Good news for developers who cannot pay for big cloud models. But 'AI that builds AI' is also the exact path safety researchers watch most closely. Small today, but worth following.