# Karan Malhotra

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/people/karan-malhotra/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

Real Alpha has cut 8 moments of Karan Malhotra (Co-founder, Nous Research) talking, from an interview on Behind the Craft published Aug 2, 2026.

- Role: Co-founder, Nous Research

## What Karan Malhotra said

- [Hermes can turn a childhood game idea into a top-tier mod](https://realalpha.app/s/hermes-can-turn-a-childhood-game-idea-into-a-top-tier-mod/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 7 min
  > “it was able to get into this niche and perform at the top 1% of modders.” — Karan Malhotra · [33:19](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=1999)
- [Adversarial context can reduce an AI’s sycophancy over time](https://realalpha.app/s/adversarial-context-can-reduce-an-ais-sycophancy-over-time/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 4 min
  > “The most powerful thing for a model is in context learning. ICL is more powerful than everything else, fine tuning, whatever.” — Karan Malhotra · [12:51](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=771)
- [One Kanban board can coordinate people and AI agents](https://realalpha.app/s/one-kanban-board-can-coordinate-people-and-ai-agents/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 3 min
  > “So the fact that I can have a human project manager on the Kanban board that's manually using it while Hermes agents are filling up the pieces” — Karan Malhotra · [24:06](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=1446)
- [Hermes uses context to align models with users](https://realalpha.app/s/hermes-uses-context-to-align-models-with-users/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 7 min
  > “By putting all this context together, we've taken Claude's main allegiance away from Anthropic to you.” — Karan Malhotra · [7:24](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=444)
- [Hermes Agent began as an open harness for reinforcement learning](https://realalpha.app/s/hermes-agent-began-as-an-open-harness-for-reinforcement/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 4 min
  > “And we built Hermes Agent initially to let anybody do RL inside of a harness.” — Karan Malhotra · [43:53](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2633)
- [Open systems give good actors a fairer path, Malhotra argues](https://realalpha.app/s/open-systems-give-good-actors-a-fairer-path-malhotra-argues/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 4 min
  > “An important note in the argument for open source is that an open system is much fairer to a good actor than a closed system with models” — Karan Malhotra · [18:01](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=1081)
- [Nous grew from two Discord friends into an open-source lab](https://realalpha.app/s/nous-grew-from-two-discord-friends-into-an-open-source-lab/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 6 min
  > “hundreds of thousands of downloads in just a few days.” — Karan Malhotra · [37:52](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=2272)
- [Hermes sells convenience and custom support around its open agent](https://realalpha.app/s/hermes-sells-convenience-and-custom-support-around-its-open/)
  Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026 · 3 min
  > “If you want to do image generation or audio or VPS spin up or web search, we have all of those subscriptions included inside of ours.” — Karan Malhotra · [21:02](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/?t=1262)

## The episode

- [Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra](https://realalpha.app/v/UWjh5Z4s8jY/) · Behind the Craft · Aug 2, 2026