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Cover image for the 23 October 2026 Signal: Only 2.5 billion of Flint's 39.8 billion parameters fire per token, yet it scores 89.7% on SWE-bench Pro v2.
THE SIGNAL · 23 OCT 2026 · 10 MIN READ

Recursive ships Flint, an open coding model that fires only 2.5B parameters

Recursive's Flint is an Apache 2.0 coding model that fires about 2.5B1 of its 39.8B2 parameters per token. It posts 89.7%3 on SWE-bench Pro v2 in the company's own comparisons.

KI Koda Editorial · Updated 00:59 GMT · 27 sources
AIOPEN MODELSROBOTICS
36 of 51 figures cited17 receipts in the register
  1. 2.5 billion1TechCrunch
  2. 39.8 billion2TechCrunch
  3. 89.7%3TechCrunch
The register
Lead Story

The day's defining move.

Open Source · TechCrunch
Lead storyOpen Source 39.8 billion2 TechCrunch · 22 OCT 2026
Open Source·TechCrunch·22 OCT 2026

Recursive Releases Flint, a Laptop-Class Open Coding Model

Recursive released Flint on Oct. 22, an open-weight mixture-of-experts coding model with 39.8 billion2 total parameters and about 2.5 billion1 active per token, under Apache 2.0 on Hugging Face. It scored 89.7%3 on SWE-bench Pro v2, behind only Qwen 3.8 in Recursive's comparisons, and Nvidia supports it on RTX Spark.

Why it mattersThe 89.7%3 SWE-bench Pro v2 figure comes from Recursive's own comparison, so check it against Qwen 3.8 on a laptop-class machine before swapping out a hosted coding model.

Continue reading
AI

In Recursive's comparisons it trails only Qwen 3.8, scoring 89.7%3 on SWE-bench Pro v2.

Markets

The Nasdaq fell 2.60% and the S&P 500 lost 1.21% while WTI crude rose 2.07%, so oil climbed as equities slid. Bitcoin dropped 3.48% and Ether 3.52%, with the crypto Fear & Greed index at 50 (Neutral).

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Markets

6 levels at the close.

Market TerminalLAST CLOSE 22 OCT 2026 · READ 2026-10-23 · Yahoo Finance
S&P 500 7,663.4311 -1.21%11 6D, window short 7,659.44 low / 7,757.17 high
Nasdaq 26,008.8612 -2.60%12 6D, window short 26,008.86 low / 26,713.03 high
Bitcoin $81,090.3813 -3.48%13 6D, window short $81,090.38 low / $84,011.97 high
Ethereum $2,383.8314 -3.52%14 6D, window short $2,383.83 low / $2,470.77 high
Crude Oil (WTI) $99.1615 +2.07%15 6D, window short $97.15 low / $103.66 high
Crypto Fear & Greed 50 / 10016 Neutral 0 to 100 index 25 fear / 50 neutral / 75 greed · alternative.me
Today's Focus

What else the day turns on.

01

Ramp Applies for Trust Charter

Ramp applies to the OCC for a national trust bank charter that would let it offer fiduciary investment management and digital-asset custody under a federal framework. The charter would not let it take deposits or make commercial loans. The filing follows Ramp's $1.85 billion raise at a $60 billion valuation.

02

OCC Finalizes GENIUS Act Rule

The OCC is the first regulator to finalize its GENIUS Act stablecoin rule, effective January 18, opening issuance to banks and non-banks and setting standards for foreign issuers and custody. The final rule drops a proposed presumption that some issuer relationships with third parties could be unlawful. The ban on issuers paying interest directly stays.

Deep Dive

Today's editorial.

All editorials
Deep Dive cover image: 2.5B Active Parameters Could Kill Your API Bill
Deep Dive7 min read

2.5B1 Active Parameters Could Kill Your API Bill

Read full analysis
The Wire

5 stories from 3 desks.

Lead carried above
Model Release·OpenAI·22 OCT 2026

OpenAI Opens Decisions API to Challenge TypeSafe's Jev

OpenAI's Decisions API, built by reconfiguring ChatGPT Luna, cut response times from one to three seconds to 100 to 180 milliseconds. It is now generally available, entering a field TypeSafe's Jev created.

Why it mattersPrice OpenAI's Decisions API against TypeSafe's Jev before moving classification calls off a full LLM, since you now have two vendors competing on speed and cost.

Read
Hardware·NVIDIA·21 OCT 2026

Nvidia Expands Local AI Lineup at GTC Berlin

At GTC Berlin, Nvidia added day-one support for Nemotron, GLM, DeepSeek, Qwen, MiniMax and FLUX.3 on RTX Spark.

Why it mattersTeams can run Nemotron, Qwen and DeepSeek on RTX Spark from day one, which means more agent work can stay on local desktops instead of metered cloud services.

Read
Biotech·Wired·22 OCT 2026

Hugging Face's Carbon-X Lets Researchers Chat With DNA

Hugging Face announced Carbon-X, the most capable model in its Carbon family for genetic sequences. It predicts mutation effects and fills in missing DNA, queried in natural language.

Why it mattersHold off on replacing existing variant-effect pipelines until Hugging Face publishes accuracy figures, since the announcement lists capabilities without scores.

Read
Also on the wire
  1. OpenAIOpenAI Launches Patch the Planet for Agent-Found Vulnerabilities
  2. OpenAIChatGPT Ads Expands to 26 More Countries
The Globe

3 stories off the AI beat.

Conflict·AP·22 OCT 2026

Iran Says Seven Tankers Hit in Hormuz

Wider Middle East fighting had paused; now Iran says seven oil tankers were attacked or damaged in the Strait of Hormuz, reviving fears that hostilities could return.

Why it mattersRenewed attacks in the Strait of Hormuz could lift shipping insurance and freight costs, which means higher fuel and power bills for energy-heavy operations such as data centers.

Read
Also on the globe
  1. APPutin Agrees in Principle to Three-Way Talks
  2. ReutersUS Orders Embassy Families Out of Saudi Arabia
The Lab

Tool of the day, researched.

All Lab reports
Blooio home page, captured for the 23 October 2026 Lab report Tool of the day 6.117/ 10
Marketing Paid from $39/mo

Blooio

Blooio moves your support queue into the verified blue-bubble thread iPhone owners already check, with Apple Pay and forms living inside the conversation.

Blooio's draw is the verified Apple Messages for Business channel, where a customer can check an order, pick a slot or pay with Apple Pay without leaving the thread. Adoption is gated by Apple's own approval, and Blooio's pricing page lists phone-number lines from $39/mo while leaving the business-chat MAU pricing off that page. Support teams whose customers mostly carry iPhones should pilot it on a single queue; buyers who want peer proof first will find very little.

Capability 7.0
Ease 5.5
Value 6.0
Momentum 5.0

Paid $39 for a monthly subscription, had a number assigned, then ran into trouble with cancellation and a refund before the next billing cycle.Paraphrased · Reddit r/SaaS

Read the Lab report Try it
Also on the radar
Build

Labelf AI: train text classifiers without writing code

Labelf AI is a low-code platform for building AI text classification models, using active learning to pick the examples most worth labeling. Upload a batch of support tickets, survey answers or reviews, labeled or unlabeled, and tag the samples it surfaces until the model sorts the rest on its own. It offers free options, so you can test it on one dataset before committing.

Try it
Coding

Reason: a low-cost coding agent that opens pull requests

Reason takes a task, writes the code, runs the tests and opens a pull request, running either in the cloud or locally. You can reach it from a Mac app, the terminal, the web or Slack, so a teammate can hand off a bug fix from a chat thread. It is listed as free, which makes it worth benchmarking against your current agent on a few small backlog tickets.

Try it
Productivity

Finalle.ai: financial intelligence from news and social data

Finalle.ai combines new-media data with generative AI, aggregating and analyzing large volumes of financial information in one place. Use it to scan market chatter and news around a ticker or sector before you read primary filings, then check its summaries against the original sources. Treat its output as a research starting point, not a trading signal.

Try it
Build

Botric AI: a conversational agent for customer service

Botric AI Agent is a conversational AI system built to handle customer service. Pilot it on your highest-volume, lowest-risk questions, such as shipping times or password resets, and track how often conversations still escalate to a human. Widen its scope only after those handoff rates look healthy.

Try it
The Arena

2 labs moved this week.

  1. OpenAIOpenAI is bringing its models to Google Cloud, where Model Garden will offer GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna. openai.com01
  2. Meta AIRecent Meta said more than 10 million users in the United States and Canada have configured its Muse personal AI agent. techorange.com · 23 OCT 202602
Builder Radar

2 receipts from the repos, one paper.

Primary sources, pulled by index
Receipts
  1. Behind: OpenAI Opens Decisions API to Challenge TypeSafe's Jev README cequence-io/openai-scala-clientOpenAI Scala Client . (TypeSafeService.systemOne: Jev, Liquid's d1, Perplexity's decider...

    OpenAI Scala Client . (TypeSafeService.systemOne: Jev, Liquid's d1, Perplexity's decider, Microsoft-Decision-1, SubQ Snap, ScaleDown's Classify, OpenRouter, Vercel AI Gateway, llama.cpp) and OpenAI's Decisions API Documentation .

    github.com
  2. Behind: Hugging Face's Carbon-X Lets Researchers Chat With DNA README huggingface/megatron-lm-carbonTraining code for the Carbon DNA language model: a thin Python package layered on top of upstream...

    Training code for the Carbon DNA language model: a thin Python package layered on top of upstream NVIDIA/Megatron-LM, consumed as a pinned git submodule so reproducibility doesn't depend on a long-lived fork.

    github.com
Paper of the day

Muse Glimmer 30B: An On-Device Agentic Model

Arash Ebrahim Abtahizadeh, Muna Aghamelu, Adil Ahmed et al. · arXiv 2026-10-17

We introduce Muse Glimmer, an open-source 30B parameter causal language model with perception encoder, purpose-built for autonomous agentic tasks on consumer hardware.

B.6.2 Non-Agentic Multilingual Capabilities. We further study how the non-agentic capabilities of Muse Glimmer transfer from English into other languages, and we report below our main findings. Strong metalinguistic reasoning..
Read the paper

Receipts come from the Firecrawl Developer Index (READMEs, docs, issues, merged PRs), first-party sources only. The paper comes from the Firecrawl Research Index: arXiv, indexed in the last 7 days and submitted this month or last, picked for today's lead. Quotes are verbatim.

THE DOJO · BUILD TODAY

Test Flint on your own code, then map one Blooio flow.

  1. 01

    Run Flint on your own tickets. Pull the open weights from Hugging Face, load a 4-bit build and feed it a handful of real tasks from your repo. Record tokens per second yourself, since laptop speed is still unverified.

  2. 02

    Sketch one Apple Messages flow. Pick a single customer interaction, such as order status or slot booking, and outline how it would run through Blooio's verified channel. Find out Apple's approval timeline before you commit engineering time.

  3. 03

    Mark January 18 on your roadmap. The OCC finalized its GENIUS Act stablecoin rule effective that date, opening issuance to banks and non-banks. If you touch payments, read the standards now and flag anything that affects your stack.

The Bottom Line

Start the slow checks first.

Flint packs strong coding scores into 2.5B1 active parameters under Apache 2.0, and Blooio shows a customer channel can hinge on an approval outside your control. Together they point to the same habit: begin the checks that take time before the build is finished. Time a 4-bit Flint build on your own tasks, since only one independent test has matched its scores so far. File any Apple Messages approval request early.

Source: techcrunch.com
Receipts

Every number, and where it came from.

36 of 51 figures cited, 17 receipts: 0 verified, 13 reported, 4 estimated
  1. 012.5 billion...coding model with 39.8 billion total parameters and about 2.5 billion active per token, under Apache 2.0 on Hugging...TechCrunch21 OCT 2026as publishedR
  2. 0239.8 billion22, an open-weight mixture-of-experts coding model with 39.8 billion total parameters and about 2.5 billion active...TechCrunch21 OCT 2026as publishedR
  3. 0389.7%It scored 89.7% on SWE-bench Pro v2, behind only Qwen 3.8 in Recursive's comparisons, and Nvidia supports it on RTX...TechCrunch21 OCT 202603B search corroborationE
  4. 04$20KThis $20K robot butler is up for reservationsTuesday Labs, via The Rundown AI22 OCT 2026as publishedR
  5. 0540BRecursive releases Flint, a 40B-parameter mixture-of-experts coding model that activates 2.5B parameters per token...Recursive, via TLDR22 OCT 2026as publishedR
  6. 062.5B...40B-parameter mixture-of-experts coding model that activates 2.5B parameters per token and runs locallyRecursive, via TLDR22 OCT 2026as publishedR
  7. 07$5 billionJPMorgan invests $5 billion in companies critical to US national securityJPMorgan, via TLDR22 OCT 2026as publishedR
  8. 08$5.66 billionSalesforce agrees to buy Braze for about $5.66 billion at $47.50 per share in cash; Braze stock jumps more than 51%Salesforce, via TLDR22 OCT 2026as publishedE
  9. 09$47.50Salesforce agrees to buy Braze for about $5.66 billion at $47.50 per share in cash; Braze stock jumps more than 51%Salesforce, via TLDR22 OCT 2026as publishedR
  10. 1051%Salesforce agrees to buy Braze for about $5.66 billion at $47.50 per share in cash; Braze stock jumps more than 51%Salesforce, via TLDR22 OCT 2026as publishedE
  11. 117,663.43S&P 500 close, -1.21% on the sessionYahoo Finance22 OCT 2026yfinance closeR
  12. 1226,008.86Nasdaq close, -2.60% on the sessionYahoo Finance22 OCT 2026yfinance closeR
  13. 13$81,090.38Bitcoin close, -3.48% on the sessionYahoo Finance23 OCT 2026yfinance closeR
  14. 14$2,383.83Ethereum close, -3.52% on the sessionYahoo Finance23 OCT 2026yfinance closeR
  15. 15$99.16Crude Oil (WTI) close, +2.07% on the sessionYahoo Finance22 OCT 2026yfinance closeR
  16. 1650 / 100Crypto Fear & Greed close, Neutral on the sessionalternative.me23 OCT 2026as publishedR
  17. 176.1 / 10Blooio, Koda score across four dimensions04R dossier23 OCT 202604R dossier scoringE
V
Verified: the stat gate corroborated this figure against an independent search before publication.
R
Reported: the figure is carried as published by the linked source and was not independently corroborated.
E
Estimated: the figure is approximate or hedged, either in the source or by the stat gate.

Method names the computation path behind the row, from a closed vocabulary: as published, yfinance close, 03B search corroboration, 04R dossier scoring, not recorded.

A figure is money, a percentage, a spelled magnitude, a multiple, a rate carrying its unit, a score over its denominator, a thousands separated number or an index close. Bare integers and years are not counted, so a phrase like "over 100 integrations" carries no mark. A chart's own scale line is the axis of the level above it and is counted once, with that level.

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