Recursive Superintelligence, the startup trying to build AI that improves itself, has released its first model. Flint is a free coding model small enough to run on a laptop. Recursive says its own automated research system helped build nearly every part of it. The company announced Flint on Wednesday and published the weights on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 licence, which allows free use and changes.

Recursive calls the system its Eureka Machine. It proposes ideas, builds them, tests them and uses the results to choose what to try next. A small team of people and agents built Flint from scratch in under four months, the company said.

How the AI helped build it

The Eureka Machine worked on the data, the training recipes, the infrastructure and the code that runs the model, according to Recursive. It also searched for the model’s shape. Flint has 40 billion parameters, but only 2.5 billion of them work on each word or code fragment.…