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Behind the Craft · 3 min · Aug 2, 2026
Hermes sells convenience and custom support around its open agent
The team bundles model routing and tool access, then sells customization, support and private training to businesses. Individuals can use the open agent without paying for those services.
Karan Malhotra is cofounder of Nous Research.
Peter Yang, Host · Host, Behind the Craft
Led product at Roblox, Reddit, Twitch and Meta for 10+ years.
About this segment
The team bundles model routing and tool access, then sells customization, support and private training to businesses. Individuals can use the open agent without paying for those services.
From “Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra”, Aug 2, 2026. Watch the full episode
Thanks. We'll look at and fix what's off.
“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.”
Takeaways
- The portal lets users switch among models in one place.
- Tool Gateway bundles access to image, audio, compute and web search.
- Enterprise work can include private, on-prem models trained on company traces.
In this episode
Full episode- 26:55Hermes can turn a childhood game idea into a top-tier mod7:03
- 11:11Adversarial context can reduce an AI’s sycophancy over time4:00
- 23:30One Kanban board can coordinate people and AI agents2:51
- 0:56Hermes uses context to align models with users7:24
- 42:35Hermes Agent began as an open harness for reinforcement learning3:30
- 16:30Open systems give good actors a fairer path, Malhotra argues3:34
- 36:03Nous grew from two Discord friends into an open-source lab5:30
20:00Hermes sells convenience and custom support around its open agent3:25
Transcript
Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.
- 20:08
Or how are you guys, like, monetizing or, like, doing this thing into a sustainable business? Like, I'm using the open source Urbanish Honors, and I'm using, like, GPT. Like, so I'm not really paying you. That's okay. And I'll tell you why. We want consumers to ultimately feel like they can do anything with it. We believe in intelligence as a public good before everything else. I care more about you using HermesAgent to make your life better than I care about you using one particular way or method of using it.
- 20:37
If you're running everything locally, if you're running through codecs, great. You know, as long as you are using this open technology, this open alternative over everything else. Now we have the Noose Portal. The Noose Portal is very similar like a router or aggregator that has a variety of different models available. So if you want to use ChatGPT or you want to use Cloud or you want to switch to Quen, et cetera, we make that all very easy inside of our portal.
- 21:03
On top of that, we have something called the Tool Gateway. In the Tool Gateway, you don't have to sign up for your extra tools, right? 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. We make deals with these other groups that we have out of Hermes agent and create frictionless methods of using their technology without needing to create 10 different signups or 10 different API keys.
- 21:28
So what we would offer to people who want it for the charge is convenience. The other thing is you will see some very interesting pricing available from us on a variety of models. And we think for ones that aren't subsidized necessarily, we have very, very strong options for people. finally like we want the consumer to be free you know as free as they can uh we we want you to make and generate income and productivity in the world more than anything else and when you get to a point where you consider yourself a small business or an enterprise or something that's where we come in that's where we come in the classic model and say hey let's give you some support the guys who made hermes agent why don't we make something more custom for you why don't we give you a version of Hermes agent that we can train on your traces, and we can make you a model. Why don't we help
- 22:19
you route models more effectively? You know, we can go to businesses and offer to transform the business, which needs a lot more handholding than the individual. If the individual is able to, as you're saying, spin up their own business, make their own chief of staff with Hermes agent, that's wonderful. Once I continue to scale on scale, they may think one of two things. One, wow, Hermes agent is great, and I have this knack for it, and I'm good to go. I can do it all myself or two i need some help with this piece of hermes agent i want it to be a little more different i need some more resources behind this who knows it better than the guys who made it and that kind of customization and support is a large part of how we and and day training on your uh your your your uh data to do rl as well to make you your own model so you're private you're on
- 23:07
on-prem, you don't have to give your data up to Claude, to GPT, you have to do muza. I think your cat likes what you're talking about. He's a big fan of open source. Yeah, that's great. That's great.