DevCheck Beating AI News: The $80 billion AI programming company Cognition launches its new model SWE-2 Flash, emphasizing faster speed and lower cost.
Compared to the previous generation SWE-2, the new model reduces usage costs to 1/5 and increases generation speed from around 60 tokens per second to 200, primarily targeting programming tasks such as code review and feature development.
SWE-2 Flash is trained on Thinking Machines' Inkling-Small foundation with a total of 276 billion parameters, but only activates approximately 12 billion parameters per generation. The prior SWE-2 used Kimi K3, a 2.8 trillion-parameter model from Moonshot AI. Cognition essentially replaced the base model with a much smaller one and enhanced its programming capabilities through targeted training.
This training also introduced an additional intermediate phase. Cognition first had the model learn trillions of tokens from code, research papers, and blogs, then applied large-scale reinforcement learning using high-quality programming tasks. The main improvements stem from richer training tasks and stricter validation of task requirements and outcomes.
In official tests, SWE-2 Flash scored 24.0 on FrontierCode 2.0—slightly higher than the previous SWE-2's 23.8—and far surpassing the base model's 3.2. However, on Terminal-Bench 4.0, the new model achieved only 20.0%, falling short of the prior SWE-2's 27.3% and significantly behind DeepSeek V4.1 Flash's 42.3%.
Cognition also claims that SWE-2 Flash outperforms all U.S.-based open-weight models in major programming benchmarks. However, the Flash model's weights remain closed for now. The company states that after security-focused training, the model's score on ExploitBench—a vulnerability exploitation test—rose from 11.3 to 34.8. Concerned about increased cyberattack risks if weights were publicly released, they plan to grant access only to vetted partners and researchers.
Currently, SWE-2 Flash is available on Devin Desktop and CLI. Pro, Max, and Teams users can use it for free until November 30th.