Grok 4.5 is a bigger deal than Fable

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
I'll say it, I'm a Grok convert. And I don't say it lightly, Grok 4.5 is a huge deal. By the end of this episode, you're going to understand how to use Grok 4.5 with Hermes to act as almost this AI co-founder for you. We break down everything for you, every step of the way. And the people that stick around to the end of this episode, I believe will be able to outperform 99% of people on this planet. Grok 4.5, I didn't think it was a big deal, but it is a big deal. And by the end of this episode, I think you'll be a convert too. Enjoy the episode.
Nick from Orgo, back on the pod. He's my agent guy. I had to bring you back on, Nick, because I'm seeing a lot of buzz hype around Grok 4.5.
Nick, by the end of the episode, what are people going to learn?

**Nick Vasilescu** (0:56)
I'm gonna teach you everything there is to know about why Grok 4.5 is the best model to be running inside of something like Hermes or OpenClaw today. And the real big unlock here is to treat it like a genuine co-founder, something that has access to all your tools, capabilities, so on and so forth.
And stop being so shy about what AI can do. When you give a tool like Hermes and you run it with Grok and it just wants to reach for every tool and actually go out and do things for you, that's the big unlock. And a lot of people, they're gonna experience for the first time what that feels like with Grok 4.5 just because of how fast, cheap and accessible it is to everybody. So yeah, I'm excited to get this in the hands of everyone.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:40)
Okay, so I mean, walk me through that a little bit. Like, you know, why is this Grok 4.5 release so big? And why should people care?

**Nick Vasilescu** (1:52)
So the biggest thing with Grok, the reason why it's such a kind of viral moment right now, is because we've had intelligent models since, you know, Opus 4.5 came out. And in a lot of ways, the release of something like Opus 4.5 from Anthropic back in December and January, that was what led to the Cloudbot, the OpenClaw moment. That model capability unlocked something with these harnesses to be able to use tools for these AI agents that before was like, you know, really not possible. And now with Grok 4.5, you have that insane level of intelligence of something like Opus 4.8 today, one of the most advanced models from Anthropic. But also you have it at a fraction of the cost. And then at a fraction of the time that you would usually take for it to complete a task. I mean, this model is insanely, insanely fast. And it just unlocks like a new user experience for something like OpenClaw or Hermes. Like it really makes it feel like it's a brand new fresh product just because of how capable it is.
So, yeah, I would say like that's the biggest breakthrough with Grok 4.5.
And then of course, like all in the same week, we have now, Meta just came out with their Spark 1.1 model and GPT 5.6 Sol came out. And I've tested all of them. And I think that they're all great. Like they have their benefits. For instance, GPT is a lot better at like computer use tasks. But still today, like to this day, and I guess the last 48 hours haven't been sleeping much, Grok 4.5 is just my workhorse. And so I just think that everyone should just be plugging this into their current stack, connecting it to their tools and seeing what it could do.

**Greg Isenberg** (3:39)
So on this FigJam, like what am I looking at exactly?

**Nick Vasilescu** (3:42)
Yeah. So here, I'm just kind of trying to demonstrate a lot of people when they think of something like Hermes or OpenClaw, the first place that their mind goes to is automation and just like I could be hands off and things are just going to be solved for me. And I think that's great and that's fine and all, but I actually think it's like the wrong frame of mind. And let me tell you why.
I think with automations, we've had automations for a while now, like even pre-AI, we've been able to automate tasks and create kind of workflows and deterministic pipelines of like things that could be automated, quote unquote. But to me, like that's not the big unlock of something like Hermes and OpenClaw. To me, the unlock is I genuinely feel like I have an AI co-founder who A has access to all the different tools that matter to me and all the different context and all the just everything that would make a co-founder great like in terms of capability.