Research
AI Minute Newsroom
2026-08-23
A 27-billion-parameter model beat Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 at reproducing published papers
Inherent, a London lab of about a dozen people founded by Google DeepMind alumni, said on 22 August that its agent Faraday produces more faithful replications of published scientific findings than Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 or OpenAI's GPT-5.5. Faraday runs on Qwen 3.6, an open 27-billion-parameter model, and was trained with long-horizon reinforcement learning. The test is Replica, Inherent's own suite of 310 tasks drawn from 100 papers in natural-language processing, materials science and weather forecasting; each task asks the agent to reproduce a figure without ever seeing the original plot, under limited time and compute. Inherent reports leading in every category, with the largest margins in meta-learning, structural biology and materials science. The lab left stealth in May 2026 with a $50 million seed round and has not yet shown a genuinely new discovery.
Why it mattersTwo caveats first: the benchmark is the company's own, and replication is not discovery. What is still notable is the size. A 27B open model with the right training beat systems perhaps a hundred times larger at a task that requires stubbornness rather than recall — reading a paper, guessing the steps the authors left out, and grinding until the chart comes back. That is a workload a university lab can afford to run.
✓ Verified · 3 sources
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