London AI startup Inherent says its Faraday agent beat Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research
Inherent, founded by Google DeepMind alumni, says its AI agent Faraday outperformed Anthropic's and OpenAI's larger models at independently reproducing scientific paper results, using a far smaller underlying model.
London-based AI startup Inherent, founded by former Google DeepMind employees, has shared its first concrete results since emerging from stealth. The company says its AI agent, Faraday, outperformed Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 at a task involving independently replicating findings from published scientific papers without prior knowledge of the correct answer.
Notably, Faraday runs on a comparatively small model called Qwen 3.6, which has just 27 billion parameters, while the rival systems it beat are much larger, frontier-scale models. Parameter count is generally used as a proxy for a model's size and training cost.
Cofounder and chief scientist Edward Hughes said what mattered most was not the win itself but how it was achieved. Replicating published papers is a standard exercise for human PhD students as well, he noted, but Inherent's broader ambition is to build AI capable of discovering new scientific knowledge, not merely verifying existing results. To that end, the company aims to give its agents "research taste" — an instinct for choosing which experiments are worth running and how to design them. Inherent develops this through reinforcement learning, a training approach that rewards good outcomes rather than following fixed rules, betting this generalizes better to broader scientific work.
Rather than building its own coding tool, Faraday relies on OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Codex for programming tasks, similar to how human scientists use existing software instead of building everything from scratch.
Inherent emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round. Its dozen employees work in person from an office in London's King's Cross neighborhood, near Google DeepMind's own offices. The company plans to grow to about 20-25 employees by the end of the year. Hughes has also publicly criticized the UK practice of "garden leave," which restricts departing employees from joining rival companies for months after resigning.
