The Most Important Trends Showing Up in New AI Products

Nathaniel Whittemore (0:00)

Once again, this week, we got some awesome new AI products and features. We got a new type of generative UI and ChatGPT, a new model from Claude that shows that Anthropic is not going to compete just at the high end of models, and a big announcement from Elon that GrokBot will use whatever models it takes to have the best experience, not just Grok models. In different ways, each of these announcements represents some key trends shaping AI right now.

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I don't normally start with fundraising stories at the top of the headlines, in fact, most fundraising stories don't actually make it. And yet, I think that Hermes Creator News Research reaching a valuation of 1.5 billion after a new funding round is worthy of discussion. In the wake of OpenClaw, a group of people took the inspiration from what OpenClaw was doing and decided to do their own version in a slightly different way. In all honesty, the group's early work felt like a mix of AI research and performance art, given that they were trying to build the first LLM trained across a distributed network of anonymous GPUs contributed by strangers on the Internet. Where they vaulted into the big leagues, however, was when they released the Hermes agent. Hermes has the same sort of extreme user control and openness that attracted people to OpenClaw, but has been moving incredibly quickly. In fact, pretty much anytime that one of the closed labs releases some cool new feature or product, you can bet that Hermes is going to have some version of it available for their users quickly thereafter. Putting some numbers on this, the Wall Street Journal reports that Hermes has now been installed 22 million times, and even more impressively, it accounts for roughly 2.5% of global token usage overall. With this funding, Nous intends to move from individual enthusiasts to the enterprise big leagues, suggesting that the fresh capital will fund the launch of Hermes for Business. Alongside the jump to enterprise, this fundraising reinforces that open source has a viable business case in the AI industry. Nous offers Hermes for free, with users able to bring their own models. But they also have a range of different subscription options which bundle frontier model usage and hosted instances. The business model allowed Nous to grow to 36 million in annualized revenue so far this year, with the target of 100 million by year end. Announcing the fundraise, CEO Dylan Rolnick posted a note that was halfway between a celebration and an open source manifesto. He wrote, The marginal cost to reproduce a piece of software has plummeted. There are few benefits to keeping a technology like Hermes agent locked down and many to proliferating it. Users don't want lock-in and they deserve observability into the thing they will allow into so many aspects of their lives. Hermes as an open ecosystem gives them a foundation of trust. We believe businesses of all size want the same liberties.

In a separate but at least philosophically related post on X, the official News Research account declared what amounted to their list of non-negotiables for AI. You should be able to use smarter models in your agent. You should be able to use cheaper models in your agent. You should be able to use local models in your agent. You should be able to use a different model for every job. You should be able to switch models in the middle of a conversation. You should be able to choose what data your agent has. You should be able to choose what it remembers and what it forgets. You should be able to choose what computer your agent runs on. You should be able to run it on a machine that never touches the internet. You should be able to run it while your laptop is closed. You should be able to reach it from apps you already use. You should be able to choose how your agent thinks. You should be able to read the prompt it runs on. You should be able to see every tool it has and turns off the ones you don't want. You should be able to teach it something once and never explain it again. You should be able to know what it did and when and why. You should be able to export your agent. You should be able to read the code. You should be able to change the code. Your agent should be yours. Congrats to the team there. I'm excited to see that force and that energy have more resources behind it. Next up, a bit of a different type of fundraising. Tens of billions of dollars of chip financing deals are being arranged as the big players seek their next round of funding. According to the Wall Street Journal, three big deals are being hashed out at the moment. Oracle is reportedly seeking funding from Apollo and Goldman Sachs for what sources called a big purchase of chips. The size of the deal wasn't disclosed, but with Oracle already at risk of a credit downgrade, this could mean they're turning to private markets in lieu of trying their luck in the investment-grade bond market. Broadcom is also in talks with private credit, with Apollo and Blackstone attached to a $50 billion deal to finance the production of OpenAI's custom chips. That deal looks like Broadcom lending their credit rating to OpenAI to access a better interest rate, suggesting the Frontier Labs could struggle to borrow at investment grade once they go public. The third deal has SpaceX approaching various lenders to borrow $40 billion to pay for NVIDIA chips.