Hermes Agent, NotebookLM & LiveKit Founders on the AI Agent Race | TWiAI 17

Hermes Agent, NotebookLM & LiveKit Founders on the AI Agent Race | TWiAI 17

June 10, 2026 · 1h 29m · Episode 17

About this episode

The episode discusses the AI agent race with founders from Hermes Agent, NotebookLM, and LiveKit, highlighting the shift in control from AI models to agent layers.

Apple just paid a rival a billion dollars a year because it could not build Siri itself, and that tells you where the AI platform war actually stands: the edge has moved up the stack, from the model to the agent layer sitting on top of it. This week's roundtable makes the case that whoever controls that layer controls the experience, and we brought in three founders building it from different angles: Hermes Agent, NotebookLM, and LiveKit. Their through-line is that the harness is temporary, the model keeps eating it, and the people building agents right now are designing for capabilities that do not exist yet. This week's roundtable: Jeffrey Quesnelle (Co-founder & CEO, Nous Research, the open source AI lab behind Hermes Agent) Steven B Johnson (Editorial Director of NotebookLM & Google Labs, co-creator of NotebookLM) Russ d'Sa (Co-founder & CEO, LiveKit, the open source real-time voice/video infrastructure behind ChatGPT voice mode) Thank you to our exclusive sponsor: PayPal Open, One Platform for All Business: https://paypalopen.com Timestamps: 0:00 Cold open 1:08 Welcome to Episode 17 1:40 Jeffrey Quesnelle on Hermes Agent and the open source agent race 5:03 Steven…

People in this episode

Host: Jason Calacanis

Guests: Jeffrey Quesnelle, Steven B Johnson, Russ d'Sa

Topics covered

Keywords

Sponsors

PayPal Open

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Nous Research, NotebookLM, LiveKit

Products: Siri, ChatGPT, Gemini, Tesla, Grok, Salesforce

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the This Week in AI podcast page.