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Inherent, DeepMind alumni startup, says its AI agent outperformed Anthropic and OpenAI at replicating research

Inherent, a London lab founded by DeepMind alumni, says its Faraday agent beat Anthropic and OpenAI models at replicating scientific research using a much smaller system.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-23 04:46

Faraday ran on Qwen 3.6, a model with 27 billion parameters, while its better-known rivals are frontier-scale systems. Inherent set a higher bar than simple accuracy, aiming for “research taste” — an instinct for which experiments are worth running and how to design them well. The company uses reinforcement learning, rewarding the system for good outcomes rather than spelling out rules for it to follow.

Edward Hughes, cofounder and chief scientist, said paper replication is a standard training exercise for human scientists. “Many PhD students actually start by doing this,” he told TechCrunch. Hughes stressed that beating other AI systems wasn’t the point. “What was most interesting to us about this was not so much the result of beating those frontier agents — which of course we liked — but was actually the way we went about building this.”

Inherent avoids building its own coding tool, instead having Faraday use OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Codex, much as human scientists rely on existing software rather than building everything themselves. Hughes described the goal as creating agents that act like curious teammates: “I got curious about this, and I went off and I did these experiments. What do you think of these results?”

The company has a dozen employees, all working in person at an office in King’s Cross, a London neighborhood that Google DeepMind’s presence helped turn into an AI hub. “We believe that London is the place to be,” Hughes said.

Hughes also called for ending “garden leave,” a common U.K. practice that bars departing employees from joining or starting a rival company for months. “This is a personal view rather than a company view, but I was affected by the garden leave problem,” he told TechCrunch. He eventually got around that constraint and started Inherent with three other cofounders, including two fellow DeepMind alumni.

Inherent plans to grow to about 20 to 25 employees by the end of the year. With Demis Hassabis’s new role leaving some DeepMind staff unsettled, the startup’s hiring push could make it an appealing destination for DeepMind employees considering a move.