London Startup Inherent Says Small AI Agent Faraday Outperformed Larger Rivals On Scientific Replication
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London AI startup Inherent, founded by Google DeepMind alumni, announced that its AI agent Faraday outperformed larger frontier systems from Anthropic and OpenAI at independently reproducing published scientific findings without prior knowledge of the results. The comparison was made against Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5, while Faraday runs on a comparatively small 27-billion-parameter model called Qwen 3.6. Co-founder and chief scientist Edward Hughes emphasized that the key achievement was not just beating larger competitors but the system's design, which relies heavily on reinforcement learning to instill research judgment rather than training primarily on scientific methodology. The startup's broader goal is to develop agents capable of contributing original scientific insight, not just verifying existing results. Inherent, which currently employs a dozen staff working in person from London's King's Cross district, plans to grow to roughly 20 to 25 employees by year's end. Hughes also publicly criticized the UK's garden leave practice, citing personal experience with the constraint while building Inherent. The announcement came weeks after the startup emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round.
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