Nous Research launches Hermes agent and hackathon, positioning open-source as cheaper alternative to Claude

Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And without further ado, we have Dylan Rolnneck from News Research coming on the show. What's going on,

Dylan? How you doing?

Yo, great to meet you guys. Big fan of your show. Happy to be here.

Thank you so much for taking the time. Uh since it is the first time on the show, please introduce yourself and what you're working on.

Yeah, I'm uh Dylan Rick. Like you said, I'm the PO and

uh broadly I would say news research is working on being a super internet native AI lab.

Okay.

Uh essentially just focused on bringing open source to the forefront doing all we can for open source AI.

Yeah. uh t talk about uh agents, harnesses, uh uh conductors, orchestration. How are how do you envision this year playing out for how people, your customers, your users will interface with AI?

Yeah. Well, so I mean I think this year has already been pretty heavy on agents. We did our

I mean claw, right? Open claws. Yeah,

we just put out Hermes agent. So, I think people are just starting to get used to a kind of different way to interact with AI that maybe they're not as used to that's like blowing people's mind. So, if you're like super close to it, some of the stuff might not be that shocking. But, I think

you saw with how things became very popular very fast. People getting a first glimpse of like putting an AI out there kind of like letting it do its thing and coming back to something that's finished or done like a work product is pretty incredible.

The rap game focus on

Keem is focused.

He's getting He's stacking Mac minis. I did. Yeah.

It's crazy.

Yeah. We got a conversion. That' be a big win for us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm a little

ridiculous.

So, anyways, yeah, I mean, like we're we we think it's super powerful. We put out our Hermes agent, like I said, sort of an alternative kind of, you know,

we view it as sort of taking the best of what you would see in a coding agent and what you would see in something like Open Claw. And then we added a bunch of capability that's important to our own work to advance the stuff that we're doing. is like if anyone's going to use a agent to advance their work like it sure as hell is going to be us first. So,

okay. So, uh when you say advance, you say advanced work, but it feels like there's still some consumer angle. Like what are the textbook use cases that you're seeing?

We're just starting to get some feedback on what people are doing, but I think, you know, from the professional standpoint, it's like uh people want a way to just have a task be put out there and they come back like they're messaging with it on Telegram. They're saying like

I'd like for you to do some research for me and then by the time I get back to my desk, I'm able to look over that kind of thing.

Sure.

But from our advantage, we put in like, you know, we have traditionally made our name basically doing post training.

Okay.

So all the tools that we've been using, we've been trying to feed into that tool so that this thing could actually help us advance that goal as well.

So are you building on top of open- source pre-trains then?

Yeah. Yeah. So what what we did to initially gain some popularity was like it was Llama was putting out base models.

Y

we fine-tuned those into something that we thought would be like something the market would want,

which is why I'm excited about the agent stuff cuz like we were kind of sitting there being like, okay, here's what we think is like a gap between what models are doing presently and what we could add to the fine tune world.

Um but once you actually have an agent out there that's like touching people and doing like economic work and helping, you get more feedback as to what it is that you actually need to post train. So for us it's kind of like now we have this thing out there. Can we shape an open source model into something that makes the best out of this harness

and is cheaper or like better across some vectors?

Uh how are you thinking about go to market? Uh the open source piece is interesting but what are the other levers to get people to adopt the product?

Yeah, I think um just budgeoning people with how you can use this thing is important. I I think there's a huge gap between what people know about AI and what AI can actually do. Like even some of the people that I consider some of the most like savvy uh non-technical users of AI are continually blown away by like what Hermes agent can do. And Hermes agent again is just like a harness on other people's agent. It's not even like the compounding effect yet.

Sure.

So I think like making that super easy for people to dive into and get. So, so yeah, what are you actually uh like pitching them because like you know chatt comes out everyone's like this can do your homework uh like this will replace like Wikipedia uh this will replace Google search right like go here and instead of just typing you know tell me the history of the Roman Empire in Google you just do that in chat and you get something that's looks different and is better in a bunch of different ways like what's your pitch for like the first prompt that they should fire off?

Oh that's a good one. Um, I think the well, so the first part of the pitch is like I think open source is crucial for a lot of people and they might not realize it yet, but I think one of the things I hear from folks that use any agent is like I'm willing to spend a couple bucks but maybe not like you know a hundred bucks a day.

Yeah.

And Claude while extraordinarily capable is expensive cuz it's just like omniapable. Um, so I think the ability to like hone in on the agentic capability at a cheaper price point is definitely part of the pitch. And I would say just like get in there, figure out what you spend the most amount of your time doing that you don't want to do and ask Hermes agent to solve that for you.

I think we need some more specificity if we want to pitch these people. It's it's tough that people need a killer use case. They need their hands held. Uh and uh there's certainly there's certainly opportunity out there. But uh uh hopefully you know this will evolve. I'm always I'm always taken by that example of midjourney where if you gave uh David Holes midjourney he said if you give people like a blank box and just say prompt whatever they want to prompt uh they will just type dog and they'll just get like a picture of a dog and they're like I could have gotten a dog on Google images like this doesn't do anything special but when they went into midjourney they saw everyone else prompting they say space dog on Mars with a you know rocket ship blah blah blah and then they would they would remix and and enjoy. How are you thinking about bringing the different community together? The different Hermes agent. I I was on Instagram and I saw someone who used OpenClaw. This is just like a family friend uh used OpenClaw to build a new uh photo album piece of software to collect photos from all of their different family resources. So they have some in Google Drive. They have the the grandparents use uh you know some Microsoft product and they wanted something that would synthesize all of this together into one. you know, central place, tag them all, do all of this. And I was like, that's an interesting use case. I like that she built that and that's something that I could maybe say, hey, maybe I want that and maybe that becomes a product one day. But, uh, how are you thinking about bringing the community together?

Yeah, that's a good point. So, here's what I'll say is when we put this out, we were kind of thinking of it as like a gift to the community. Like, we're very open source focused, like I said, like let's just see what people can make use of this thing. and we're probably in that discovery phase of like

what is it that people are doing? So, we had a bunch of immediately

cool stuff that I thought came out and then we're putting together a hackathon right now to try to get more of that. Like

you want to see, like you said, you want to be inspired by what other people are doing. So, we're putting together a hackathon that's going to start tomorrow online.

Let everyone do I think we're in play mode. Like do the coolest stuff that you can

and let's figure out what exactly hits.

Yeah. I mean, it is like the best time to go to a hackathon to host a hackathon. Like we are truly at this like incredible moment where the tools are much better.

I would use the agent to figure out homes in my area that look like castles because I'm very inspired by our somewhat of a castle.

This is a cool building.

Yeah, I'm in a castle. But yeah, I mean you might not want to give that away because that could be a hit for the hackathon.

You know Casey Hanmer, he uh Terraform, he uh he operates his business out of a castle in Burbank. It's amazing. It makes you feel very secure and strong. So,

it has like true turrets. It was built, it's not really like a defensible castle. I think it was built more for maybe just a crazy person or something. Maybe for a film industry or something, but it looks fantastic. And your office looks fantastic as well. Congratulations on all the success.

Shoot us shoot us a note on on who ends up winning the hackathon and we'll cover it.

That'd be awesome. I'm sure I'm sure you'll be talking about it as well.

Appreciate that.

Anyway, Dylan, have a great rest of your day.

Great to meet you, Dylan.

We'll talk to you soon.

Great to meet you guys. Have a great one.

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