Springboards, an AI-powered platform built to inspire creativity in advertising, has launched the Alpha version of Flint, an AI model for marketers and creatives designed to generate high-variance options and break out of predictable outputs. Flint launches as part of a full overhaul of the Springboards platform, designed to give more freedom to users.
Flint has been designed as a creative-focused alternative to the well-known large language models, which typically converge on a narrow set of familiar responses, even when prompts are open-ended. While this makes them effective for utility tasks, it can limit their value in creative and strategic work where diversity of thought is critical. Flint explores a broader range of possibilities and surfaces less obvious directions, enabling marketers and creatives to generate a wider spread of ideas at the earliest stages of thinking.
It launches as part of a wider update of the Springboards platform, with a redesigned user experience and a new range of ‘self-serve’ flexible plans, including free and paid tiers and the new Spark Sessions webinar series featuring prominent industry leaders.
Pip Bingemann, Co-Founder and CEO of Springboards, says: “We never set out to become a model company, we set out to help people have better ideas. But after three years building Springboards one thing became impossible to ignore: frontier models were getting smarter, faster, and more polished, while their outputs were getting eerily similar and more repetitive.
“For a lawyer or an accountant, convergence can be a feature, but for a strategist, writer, marketer, comedian or creative team, it’s a bug. So we built Flint, the model we needed for ourselves.”
A tiny but mighty creative inspiration model
Based on a lightweight, open-source foundation model, Flint favours speed and iteration over heavyweight “smartness.” In testing, it significantly outperformed leading LLMs on creative diversity, scoring 7/10 on the independent Novelty Bench compared to an average of 2.88. This means that when prompted ten times, Flint generates seven functionally distinct responses, rather than just offering surface-level paraphrases of the same idea.
Kieran Browne, Chief Technology Officer of Springboards, adds: “Flint is a tiny but mighty model that is significantly outperforming the world’s largest LLMs on the one metric that actually matters for the future of the creative industries: novelty. The reality is that frontier models are prioritising accuracy and correctness over originality and entropy.
“Flint is built on the belief that human taste and creativity must be at the core of good creative work; we are optimising for variation rather than automation. And what’s particularly exciting is that we have been able to achieve all of this without degrading the base model’s general capabilities, proving that you can train a model to range more widely without gutting what it already knows.”
New self-serve platform and creative masterclass series to launch alongside Flint
The newly redesigned Springboards platform includes an updated user interface to allow it to be seamlessly integrated into any advertising and marketing team’s workflows.
Springboards is also expanding its service tiers for the platform, opening up direct access to the model and a suite of tools through flexible plans, including free and paid tiers. These options open up the platform for freelancers, small teams and boutique agencies and recognise the rapid evolution of the ecosystem in the modern advertising and marketing industry.
It is also launching Spark Sessions, a monthly masterclass series focused on advertising and creative strategy. Available to annual subscribers, the series is designed to help marketers and creatives sharpen their craft by learning directly from the industry’s leading tastemakers. The sessions will feature globally recognised practitioners, including Mark Pollard, James Hurman, Tom Morton, Lucy Verby, Faris Yakob, Rosie Yakob and Zoe Scaman, covering topics across creative development and emerging AI workflows. More speakers to be announced later.
Amy Tucker, Co-founder of Springboards, says: “Since day one, our customers have been at the centre of our innovation. Our goal has always been to build tools that enable advertisers and marketers to do their best work, and this new platform is the culmination of that. We’re so excited to finally open this up to everyone, from solo freelancers to global agency teams. Whether you’re a strategist, a creative or marketer, you can now use our platform and model to explore your best ideas with expert support at every stage of the creative process.”
A global standard for creative ideation
The launch of Flint marks a significant evolution for Springboards. Over the past three years, the company has transitioned from a specialised advertising and marketing tool to a global platform, seeing massive momentum with hundreds of agency and in-house teams across the US, UK and Australia, including TRG and BMF. With Flint, Springboards is upleveling its offering with an engine that provides the efficiency of AI without sacrificing the friction and unpredictability that makes human ideas great.
Thomas Humphrey, Investments Partner at Blackbird, says: “We’re seeing a clear shift in the market from generalised AI and ‘one model to rule them all’ to models purpose-built in scale, cost, and design for specific capabilities – and creativity is one of the hardest specialties to crack.
“Springboards understands the alchemy of a great idea from the inside – they’re agency veterans who built the thing they wished existed. Flint isn’t AI as decoration – it’s the engine the whole software product is built around. That’s the kind of conviction we back.”
Flint is available globally from today.
To learn more or sign up, visit: springboards.ai or springboards.ai/models/flint-alpha
