British startup Inherent, founded by former Google DeepMind staff, emerged from stealth mode just a few weeks ago and immediately revealed its key product — Faraday, an AI agent capable of independently verifying the validity of scientific publications. According to TechCrunch, the company raised $50 million in an early funding round almost simultaneously with its public announcement. The developers claim that Faraday can reproduce the findings of already published scientific studies without any prior prompts, and that in internal tests it outperformed significantly larger frontier models from competitors.
How Faraday works and what it can do
The system's key feature is that it runs on a relatively small model, Qwen 3.6, with 27 billion parameters. In its internal tests, Inherent compared Faraday against Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 and OpenAI's GPT-5.5 — noticeably larger models. What was evaluated was not only the ability to reproduce the results of the original work, but also so-called "research intuition": the ability to independently decide which experiments are worth conducting and how to organize them. Inherent co-founder and chief scientist Edward Hughes noted that this kind of work is standard preparation for humans as well: many PhD students begin their scientific careers precisely by replicating studies that have already been carried out.
Training method and the project's ultimate goal
Faraday was trained using reinforcement learning (RL): the system receives a reward for a successful outcome rather than following pre-defined rigid rules. Hughes emphasized that for the team, this approach mattered more than beating competitors. Inherent's ultimate goal is to create an AI scientist capable not just of checking existing conclusions, but of acquiring new scientific knowledge. At the same time, the startup is not trying to build every tool in-house: for programming, for example, Faraday uses OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Codex, which Inherent compares to ordinary researchers using off-the-shelf software.
Contradictory data
It is important to note that the claimed superiority of Faraday over Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 is based on the startup's own internal tests, not on an independent public benchmark, so the figures and conclusions cannot yet be considered verified by a third party. Moreover, because the agent relies on OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Codex for programming, a direct comparison of its results with a "pure" GPT-5.5 is methodologically debatable: part of the computational work is in fact performed by a tool from the same vendor being compared against. The developers, in turn, stress that this is an acceptable practice, analogous to using ready-made software in real science.
Team, location, and stance on garden leave
Inherent currently has around 12 employees in London's King's Cross district, with plans to expand the team to 20–25 people by the end of the year. Hughes called the area a good fit thanks to its high concentration of AI specialists. At the same time, he spoke out against the common UK practice of garden leave, under which a departing employee is barred from joining competitors or founding their own company for several months: the head explained that he himself faced such a restriction before founding Inherent together with other former Google DeepMind staff.
