A 27B model beat Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 at reproducing scientific papers

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Inherent, a British lab founded by DeepMind alumni Edward Hughes, Louis Kirsch, Kaloyan Aleksiev and Tantum Collins, released Faraday, an agent that reproduces published papers' findings without advance knowledge of the results. Faraday runs on Qwen 3.6 at 27 billion parameters and outperformed Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 on that replication task, which the team credits to reinforcement-learned "research taste" for experiment selection rather than raw scale. Inherent raised a $50 million seed and plans 20 to 25 staff by year end; TechCrunch's write-up gives no exact comparative scores, so treat the margin as unquantified.