DeepMind Spinout's Tiny AI Beats OpenAI, Anthropic

London startup Inherent, founded by Google DeepMind alumni, claims its AI agent Faraday has outperformed frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI at independently replicating published scientific research. Notably, Faraday runs on a 27-billion-parameter model, far smaller than the systems it beat. The company, which emerged from stealth with a $50 million seed round, uses reinforcement learning to teach AI research instincts rather than rigid rules. Its longer-term goal is building AI capable of discovering genuinely new scientific knowledge, not just verifying existing results.