We're thrilled to release Darwin-9B-NEG, a 9B-parameter reasoning model that embeds an architecturally-internalised sense of self-confidence directly into the transformer โ our proprietary Native Entropy Gating (NEG) technology.
With only 9 billion parameters and 1ร inference cost, Pure NEG jumps +12.63 %p over the same model without NEG. Going all-in with ensemble refinement pushes it to 84.34 % โ surpassing the published Qwen3.5-9B leaderboard score (81.7 %) by +2.64 %p.
๐ฌ What makes NEG different from Multi-Turn Iteration (MTI)?
Classical MTI needs 3-8ร extra inference passes. NEG instead lives INSIDE the single decoding loop. Two tiny modules ride with the transformer: NEG-Head predicts per-token entropy from the last hidden state, and NEG-Gate conditionally restricts the top-k choice when confidence is low. The gate activates in only 4.36 % of tokens โ essentially free at inference time.
โจ Key differentiators โข Architecturally internalised โ model file *is* the feature โข 1ร inference cost (vs. 3-8ร for MTI) โข Drop-in with vLLM / SGLang / TGI / transformers โ no extra engine โข +12.63 %p reasoning at zero latency overhead โข Single-file deployment, Apache 2.0 licensed
๐งฌ Darwin-27B-Opus: 86.9% on GPQA Diamond โ World #5, Zero Training We are excited to share Darwin-27B-Opus, a 27B model that achieved 86.9% on GPQA Diamond โ ranking #5 globally on the HuggingFace leaderboard โ 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 โ 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 โ 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 โ autonomously validating our core principle: FFN carries knowledge, Attention carries reasoning.
๐ Public release: 10 days โ 300+ community derivatives, 120K+ downloads.