A 27B AI scientist beats far larger models at reproducing unseen figures

Claim

Faraday, a 27-billion-parameter AI scientist trained to reproduce figures from papers it never saw, beat Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 in every category while wielding a bigger coding agent as its tool, and in 153 autonomous eight-day runs Claude Fable 5 closed 81.7% of the gap to a human speedrun record, though no run invented a new method.

Reported metric: 81.7% of the gap

Reporting date: 2026-08-16 (not necessarily the event date)

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

• Welcome to August 16, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)