Coral Protocol Outperforms Microsoft by 34% With Top GAIA Benchmark for AI Mini-Model

By Chainwire

London, England, August 7th, 2025, Chainwire

Coral Protocol’s multi-agent system has outperformed the Microsoft-backed Magnetic-UI by an unprecedented 34% on the GAIA Benchmark, demonstrating a productive alternative to vertical scaling in AI. The protocol has vowed to surpass modern AI performance limits by scaling systems horizontally, favoring intelligent orchestration over constant parameter extension.

Coral achieved the highest score on the GAIA Benchmark for verified systems using mini agents, validating NVIDIA’s thesis that smaller models – when orchestrated intelligently – represent the industry’s future. However, the team say the result had less to do with building a powerful system than altering the way we think about scaling AI systems themselves.

An open protocol, Coral is designed to push AI beyond its typical capacity. Rather than scaling up general models, it facilitates the scaling of intelligence by layering in focused, specialized agents from around the world. Through secure, parallel, multi-agent coordination, Coral enables any language model – large or small – to operate more effectively, delivering superior reasoning, planning, and problem-solving.

“This breakthrough marks a turning point in AI infrastructure,” says Coral CTO Caelum Forder. “It’s proof that horizontal scaling isn’t just possible – it’s practical, and Coral is the most effective way to do it. The Internet of Agents is now a working reality. If you are an agent developer, just Coralise it. If you are an application developer, build it better for less using our infrastructure.”

Competition between entities looking to create the most advanced agentic system has intensified, with the trend towards building larger models to handle ever more complex tasks. Coral’s results, however, fly in the face of convention and bear out the findings of a recent NVIDIA paper showing that smaller systems are sufficiently powerful – and do not sacrifice on speed, security, and cost. 

A multi-layered evaluation suite for advanced AI capabilities, the GAIA Benchmark is used to determine the ability of AI systems to solve real-world tasks requiring significant time and effort for skilled humans. It takes the form of 450 non-trivial questions demanding intensive research, data analysis, and reasoning. Developed to evaluate LLM agents on their ability to act as general-purpose AI assistants, GAIA is the industry standard for measuring model performance. 

Coral’s GAIA Agent System used in the test is an application built on the eponymous protocol and heavily inspired by CAMEL’s OWL. It deploys specialized agents for a multitude of tasks such as answer finding, assistance, critique, image analysis, planning, problem solving, search, video processing, and web browsing. Agents interface with one another using the Coral server’s MCP communication tools.

Topping the GAIA Benchmark leaderboard for small models illustrates Coral’s ability to improve the capabilities of all AI systems through graph-based architecture. In the process, it gives developers confidence they can create powerful yet lightweight agents supported by small models. Such systems are capable of working with more information, are more easily integrated into other ecosystems, and benefit from better interconnectivity.

“The role of small models in agentic systems has been undersold to date, but the tides are starting to turn,” says Caelum Forder. “We have proven that such models can scale beyond their previously known limits and outcompete the incumbents. I’m confident they have a central role to play in the future of agentic AI.”

About Coral Protocol

Coral Protocol is an open and decentralized collaboration infrastructure that enables communication, coordination, trust and payments for The Internet of Agents: laying the foundation for safe AGI. Coral is the decentralized protocol powering AI agent collaboration, trust, and payments; laying the foundation for safe AGI.

Learn more: https://www.coralprotocol.org/

Contact

Roman J. Georgio
Coral Protocol
roman@coralprotocol.org

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