Springboards Launches ‘Flint’ to Break AI’s Habit of Predictable, Boring Answers

The world’s first divergence model expands the creative idea space by maximising the variance of every response

SYDNEY and NEW YORK, April 13, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Springboards today announced the alpha launch of Flint, an AI tool for marketers and creatives designed to generate high-variance options and break out of predictable outputs.

Ask any LLM to pick a number between 1 and 10 and you will get a 7 followed by a 3 (or a 4) followed by a 9. This is because all LLMs tend to converge on a narrow set of predictable answers, even for open-ended queries. This makes them good at utility tasks like telling you the capital of France but terrible at creativity and brainstorming, where diverse ideas are essential. Flint has the opposite instincts. It is tuned to explore the model's latent knowledge and surface non-obvious directions quickly, repeatedly, and on demand to inspire better creative thinking. For creatives and marketers using the Springboards platform, where the model will be available exclusively, it means they are able to produce a wider spread of ideas and inspiration at the earliest stage of thinking.

“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,” said Pip Bingemann, Co-Founder and CEO of Springboards. “For a lawyer or an accountant, convergence can be a feature. For a strategist, writer, marketer, comedian or creative team, it is a bug. So we built Flint, the model we needed ourselves.”

A tiny but mighty creative inspiration model

Based on a lightweight, open-source foundation model, Flint favors 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.

“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,” said Kieran Browne, Chief Technology Officer of Springboards. “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.”

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 specialized agency tool to a global platform, seeing massive momentum with 100s of PR, media, creative, experiential and inhouse client agencies across the US, UK and Australia, including TRG and BMF. With Flint, Springboards is upleveling their offering with an engine that provides the efficiency of AI without sacrificing the friction and unpredictability that makes human ideas great.

"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. Pip and Amy understand the alchemy of a great idea from the inside—they're agency veterans who built the thing they wished existed—and Kieran is assembling one of the most capable AI research teams in Australia. 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," said Thomas Humphrey, Investments Partner at Blackbird.

New flexible tiers to suit all kinds of creatives

Alongside Flint, 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, for freelancers, small teams and boutique agencies for the first time. The addition of these flexible licensing options makes the platform more accessible to a global audience of strategists, creatives and marketers, lowering the barrier to entry while accelerating adoption at scale.

“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 Flint is the culmination of that,” said Amy Tucker, Co-founder of Springboards. “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.”

“What if your imaginary strategy friend didn’t have to be imaginary? Springboards gets you to more curious places faster and helps sharpen your sense of what good, better, best looks like. Surrender to it,” said Christopher Owens, Head of Brand Strategy, TRG

“Springboards is an incredible ideation platform and creative strategy partner. It surfaces ideas and insights that other models ignore and, in doing so, takes you down the most unexpected and refreshing creative paths,” said Anna Bollinger, Executive Planning Director, BMF

As concerns grow around AI-driven sameness and over-automation, Springboards offers an antidote: a platform designed to enhance human creativity, not automate it away.

Flint is available globally from today.
To learn more or sign up, visit: springboards.ai or springboards.ai/models/flint-alpha

About Springboards:

LLMs are built to be right. Springboards is built to be interesting.
Springboards is an AI platform for advertising and marketing teams who want better ideas, not just faster answers.
While most AI models converge on a single "correct" output, Springboards is built to expand the range of thinking.
It combines the world's leading AI models with Flint, its own model for creative divergence, to help teams explore more directions, without replacing human judgment or craft.

Founded by Pip Bingemann, Amy Tucker, and Kieran Browne, Springboards works with 100+ companies globally.
springboards.ai | hello@springboards.ai

For media inquiries, please contact: press@springboards.ai

Legal Disclaimer:

EIN Presswire provides this news content "as is" without warranty of any kind. We do not accept any responsibility or liability for the accuracy, content, images, videos, licenses, completeness, legality, or reliability of the information contained in this article. If you have any complaints or copyright issues related to this article, kindly contact the author above.