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 โ surpassing its 58.6% original ancestor and even gemma-4-31B (84.3%) โ 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 โ 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 โ 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% โ 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 โ 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.
๐ Try it now: FINAL-Bench/Gemma-4-Multi Two Models, One Space Switch between both Gemma 4 variants in a single interface:
โก Gemma 4 26B-A4B โ MoE with 128 experts, only 3.8B active params. 95% of the 31B's quality at ~8x faster inference. AIME 88.3%, GPQA 82.3%. ๐ Gemma 4 31B โ Dense 30.7B. Best quality among Gemma 4 family. AIME 89.2%, GPQA 84.3%, Codeforces 2150. Arena open-model top 3.
Features
Vision โ Upload images for analysis, OCR, chart reading, document parsing Thinking Mode โ Toggle chain-of-thought reasoning with Gemma 4's native <|channel> thinking tokens System Prompts โ 6 presets (General, Code, Math, Creative, Translate, Research) or write your own Streaming โ Real-time token-by-token response via ZeroGPU Apache 2.0 โ Fully open, no restrictions
Technical Details Built with the dev build of transformers (5.5.0.dev0) for full Gemma 4 support including multimodal apply_chat_template, variable-resolution image processing, and native thinking mode. Runs on HF ZeroGPU with @spaces.GPU โ no dedicated GPU needed. Both models support 256K context window and 140+ languages out of the box.
๐งฌ Darwin-35B-A3B-Opus โ The Child That Surpassed Both Parents
What if a merged model could beat both its parents? We proved it can. Darwin-35B-A3B-Opus is a 35B MoE model (3B active) built with our Darwin V5 engine โ the first evolution system that CT-scans parent models before merging them. ๐ค Model: FINAL-Bench/Darwin-35B-A3B-Opus
The result speaks for itself: GPQA Diamond 90.0%, versus Father (Qwen3.5-35B-A3B) at 84.2% and Mother (Claude 4.6 Opus Distilled) at 85.0%. That's +6.9% over Father and +5.9% over Mother. Not a tradeoff โ a genuine leap. Meanwhile, MMMLU sits at 85.0% (Father: 85.2%), multimodal is fully intact, and all 201 languages are preserved.
How? Model MRI changed everything. Traditional merging is guesswork. Darwin V4 added evolution. Darwin V5 added X-ray vision. Model MRI scans each parent layer by layer and discovers: Mother's L34โL38 is the reasoning engine (peak cosine distance), 50โ65% of Mother's experts are dead (killed by text-only distillation), and Father is a healthy generalist with every expert alive. The prescription: transplant Mother's reasoning brain at L38 (90% weight), replace her dead experts with Father's living ones, and let Father's router handle the output layer. Reasoning went up. Versatility stayed intact. No tradeoff โ just evolution.
35B total, 3B active (MoE) ยท GPQA Diamond 90.0% ยท MMMLU 85.0% (201 languages) ยท Multimodal Image & Video ยท 262K native context ยท 147.8 tok/s on H100 ยท Runs on a single RTX 4090 (Q4) ยท Apache 2.0 Darwin V5's full algorithm and technical details will be released alongside an upcoming paper.