🧬 Darwin-27B-Opus: 86.9% on GPQA Diamond — World #5, Zero Training
We are excited to share Darwin-27B-Opus, a 27B model that achieved 86.9% on GPQA Diamond — ranking #5 globally on the HuggingFace leaderboard — without a single gradient update.

How? Darwin breeds pretrained models through evolutionary FFN crossbreeding. The father (Qwen3.5-27B) provides the reasoning architecture; the mother (Claude 4.6 Opus Reasoning Distilled) contributes structured chain-of-thought knowledge. CMA-ES automatically discovers optimal per-layer blending ratios — no human tuning required.

The result surpasses the original Qwen3.5-27B (85.5%), GLM-5.1 (744B, 86.2%), and Qwen3.5-122B (86.6%). A 27B model outperforming 744B — with zero training, zero data, one GPU, ~2 hours.

We also confirmed hybrid vigor on Korean benchmarks: Darwin-27B-KR (2nd generation offspring) surpassed both parents on CLIcK, winning 7 out of 11 categories. The evolutionary optimizer independently assigned 93% of FFN from the Korean-specialized mother while preserving 93% of attention from the reasoning-specialized father — autonomously validating our core principle: FFN carries knowledge, Attention carries reasoning.

📊 Public release: 10 days → 300+ community derivatives, 120K+ downloads.

🔗 Links:
Darwin-27B-Opus: FINAL-Bench/Darwin-27B-Opus
article: https://huggingface.co/blog/FINAL-Bench/darwin-gpqa
Darwin Family Collection: https://huggingface.co/collections/FINAL-Bench/darwin-family

If foundation models are raw ore, Darwin is the forge. We are just getting started. 🔥

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Darwin-4B-david

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The child surpassed both parents — that is evolution

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FINAL-Bench/Darwin-4B-David

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Why This Matters — David Defeats Goliath

MODEL: FINAL-Bench/Darwin-4B-David
SPACE: FINAL-Bench/Darwin-4B-david

We're releasing Darwin-4B-David, the first second-generation model in the Darwin Opus family. By evolving an already-evolved model, it achieves 85.0% on GPQA Diamond — surpassing its 58.6% original ancestor and even gemma-4-31B (84.3%) — with just 4.5B parameters.

Second-Generation Evolution
Most merges start from a base model and produce a single offspring. Darwin-4B-David breaks this pattern. The Father (Darwin-4B-Opus) was already evolved from gemma-4-E4B-it with Claude Opus reasoning distillation — a Gen-1 model. The Mother (DavidAU's DECKARD-Expresso-Universe) brings Unsloth deep tuning across 5 in-house datasets with thinking mode by default. Crossbreeding these two produced the first Gen-2 Darwin model.

Darwin V6's Model MRI scanned both parents across all 42 layers, assigning independent optimal ratios per layer. The Mother's creativity and Korean language hotspot (Layer 22-25, weight 0.95) was maximally absorbed, while the Father's reasoning core (Layer 30-40, weight 0.48) was preserved. This is "Merge = Evolve" applied recursively — evolution of evolution.

Benchmarks
Darwin-4B-David scores 85.0% on GPQA Diamond (+26.4%p over original 58.6%), evaluated generatively with maj@8 (8 generations per question, majority vote), Epoch AI prompt format, thinking mode enabled, 50 sampled questions. On ARC-Challenge (25-shot, loglikelihood), both score 64.93% — expected, as loglikelihood doesn't capture thinking-mode reasoning differences.

Why This Matters
gemma-4-31B (30.7B) scores 84.3%. Darwin-4B-David surpasses it at 1/7th the size — no training, no RL, just 45 minutes of MRI-guided DARE-TIES on one H100. The name "David" honors Mother creator DavidAU and evokes David vs. Goliath.