Inherent, founded by DeepMind alumni, says its AI ‘teammate’ just outperformed Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research
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Inherent, a London AI lab founded by Google DeepMind alumni, announced that its AI agent Faraday outperformed Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 at independently reproducing findings from published scientific papers. The company says Faraday runs on a much smaller model, Qwen 3.6 with 27 billion parameters, and was evaluated not just on accuracy but also on demonstrating 'research taste' in designing experiments. Inherent uses reinforcement learning rather than explicit rules to teach this taste, aiming toward a longer-term goal of an AI scientist agent. The startup emerged from stealth weeks ago with a $50 million seed round and had Faraday use OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Codex instead of building its own coding tool. Its roughly dozen employees work in person in London's King's Cross, and it plans to expand headcount to 20-25 by year-end. Co-founder Edward Hughes also expressed a personal view against the U.K.'s 'garden leave' practice, which delayed his ability to start the company.
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