#796: Own Your Intelligence Stack with Tommy Eastman

SPEAKER_1 (0:07)

You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.

Tommy Eastman (0:10)

When you talk about a Fed just going nuts, all the central banks going nuts.

SPEAKER_1 (0:16)

So it's all acting like safe haven.

I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin.

SPEAKER_3 (0:31)

If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Marty Bent (0:38)

I've been very much looking forward to that. I was very excited when we first talked a couple of weeks ago because I've been using your product for four months now. And it has changed my life. You saw me when you walked in here. You thought I was on the phone. I was talking to my Hermes Agent.

Tommy Eastman (0:52)

No, talking to your Hermes Agent. Better than talking to somebody.

Marty Bent (0:57)

I like the human element, okay? I do like talking to my wife, Greg, who's off camera here. He's okay to talk to every once in a while. But it's changed how I work pretty quickly. I mean, I'm 35 I've been doing TFTC for almost a decade now. And within six months, my whole workflow has changed. And Hermes is a critical part of that. Yeah.

What? Let's take a step back and talk about you personally, how you ended up at Nous Research, which built the Hermes Agent.

You were in the Bitcoin industry, crypto industry, a foundry before this. And that's, I mean, that's a whole other conversation. I think it's really interesting how a lot of these up and coming AI companies are seated with people that have been in the Bitcoin and crypto industry before. But how did you end up at News? What drew you to it? And what have you been doing there?

Tommy Eastman (1:57)

So I was I was at foundry, touched the Bitcoin stuff a fair bit, but was really focused on distributed and decentralized AI there. I just thought that AI, obviously an incredibly powerful tool, very important that we get the ideological part of AI shaped correctly. That was my first real exposure to that thinking about the importance of AI for people, for the individual, the sovereignty that AI enables.

I didn't really like a lot of the kind of first manifestations of that, the first projects that kind of tried to champion that. I wasn't that impressed with. I found Nous eventually, they were focused on post-training, open models to make them more pliable, more human. This was when the meta models were state of the art, the Lama models.

I quickly found that the team was just incredible. One, very ideologically driven. At Nous, we truly believe that the ability to own your intelligence stack is the most important technological innovation that we've ever faced as humans. But also that the team was just incredibly sharp. Everybody at Nous is just a killer. In love with AI, very driven. It's just an incredible experience. Yeah, for me, I focus on a handful of things. We all wear a bunch of different hats. We're still pretty small, pretty grassroots. So I touch a bunch of stuff on the product side, on-boarding enterprises and manage all of our compute relationships as well. So we have our managed product, which is News Portal, which can power Hermes Agent and powers Hermes Agent for a lot of users. So managing all the inference and tools behind that.

Marty Bent (4:07)

So let's take a step back and just explain Hermes. Let's focus on Hermes specifically. Because we've had this conversation all fair a couple of times now, but speaking to the person who thinks that the creme de la creme of their interaction with AI is opening Chat Sheep ET and hitting chat and thinking that they're getting inexperienced. What does Hermes bring to the table and how should people view the Hermes harness and how to utilize it?

Tommy Eastman (4:37)

Yeah, well, that's the incredible piece, right? Is that we're so early. We feel like AI is everywhere and everybody's talking about AI. But there's only a small slice of people actually using AI. And then the vast majority of that slice of people are just using AI basically as advanced Google, right? Google on steroids. Like my mom loves perplexity. She uses perplexity all the time, but she's basically just, she likes it because it's Google, but a little nicer.

So where you make that jump from AI chat bot to Agendic AI is when you start to enable actual autonomy. So these agents start to actually be able to make some decisions for you and carry out tasks without you having to sit there and monitor them 24-7. You can go and have an agent book reservations for you. You can have an agent look at data that you have and build dashboards. You can start to really automate real tasks. At Nous, we use it for a bunch of different things ranging from managing our CRM of enterprise customers to taking ideas that we have for content generation and working through a whole creative pipeline to create our end product. Why Hermes Agent itself is, I think, very special.