Hermes Co-Founder on Building an AI Agent That Improves Itself | Karan Malhotra
About this episode
Karan Malhotra discusses the development of Hermes, an AI agent that improves itself, and the implications of open-source AI.
📌 Copy my personal AI system to save time and build with AI: https://www.behindthecraft.com/ 🤝 Get my free AI newsletter read by 150K+ professionals: https://creatoreconomy.so/ Karan co-founded Nous Research, the company behind Hermes, the #1 personal agent and AI app overall on OpenRouter. I found him incredibly down to earth as we discussed why open-source AI must win, how Hermes gets better the more you use it, and even a live demo of how Hermes can mod your favorite childhood games. Karan and I talked about: (00:00) How Hermes differs from Claude Code and Codex (02:20) Why every AI model now sounds exactly the same (11:16) How to stop AI from saying “you’re absolutely right” (15:16) How Hermes creates skills without bloating its context (16:40) The open vs. closed-source debate on AI safety (23:40) Using one Kanban board for humans and AI agents (26:45) Demo: Rebuilding a childhood Sonic world with Hermes (36:07) How two Discord friends built a self-improving agent (42:40) How Hermes became its own biggest contributor Thanks to our sponsors: Riverside: All-in-one AI studio for podcasts and video https://creators.riverside.com/PeterYang Linear: The AI agent platform for…
People in this episode
Host: Peter Yang
Guest: Karan Malhotra
Topics covered
- AI agents
- open-source AI
- self-improving technology
- game modification
- AI safety
- Kanban boards
Keywords
- AI
- Hermes
- Nous Research
- self-improving agent
- open-source
- game modification
- AI safety
- Kanban board
Sponsors
Riverside, Linear, Wispr Flow
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Nous Research, OpenRouter
Products: Hermes
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