Inherent is a London AI lab founded by former Google DeepMind employees. The company has gotten less attention than some other DeepMind spinouts.
That changed this week when Inherent shared results from its AI agent, named Faraday. The company says Faraday can reproduce results from published science papers.
It does this without being told the answers in advance. This is a common training task used to test research skills.
Inherent says Faraday performed better at this task than larger models built by Anthropic and OpenAI. Those companies have far more funding and staff than Inherent.
How Faraday Was Built
Faraday runs on a small model called Qwen 3.6. That model has 27 billion parameters, which is a measure of a model's size.
This is much smaller than the frontier models it was tested against, Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. Cofounder Edward Hughes said paper replication is a common exercise for new scientists too.
He said many PhD students start their research training this way. The goal was not just accuracy, but also good judgment about which experiments to run.
Inherent calls this quality "research taste." The company used reinforcement learning to train Faraday for this skill.
Reinforcement learning rewards an AI system for good outcomes rather than giving it fixed rules to follow. Hughes said this method should help Faraday generalize across different science fields over time.
Instead of building its own coding tool, Inherent had Faraday use OpenAI's GPT-5.5 Codex. Hughes compared this to how human scientists often use existing tools instead of building everything from scratch.
Inherent's Plans and Team
Inherent works out of an office in King's Cross, London. All twelve of its employees work in person at that office.
Hughes said he believes London is a strong location for AI talent. He pointed to Google DeepMind's long presence in the area as one reason for that.
He also spoke about a UK practice called "garden leave." This rule can stop former employees from joining or starting a rival company for months after they resign.
Hughes said this rule affected him personally before he helped start Inherent. He called for the practice to end, though he said this was his own view and not a company position.
Inherent plans to grow its headcount to about 20 to 25 people by the end of the year. The company was founded by Hughes and three other cofounders, including additional DeepMind alumni.
Inherent's next steps will focus on expanding its team and continuing work on its agent Faraday.
