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.