Jensen closed his GTC Berlin 2026 keynote with this Hermes Agent demo as the finale. He introduced it by saying the way to build an agent is to ask an agent to build it for you, so he installed and set up a customized Hermes in one prompt. Then he used Hermes, running on @nvidia RTX Spark, to create a simulated training environment for the @huggingface Microduck. Hermes planned an obstacle course with Nemotron and had GPT-6 Astra build it using FreeCAD, Omniverse libraries, Blender, Newton, and Isaac Lab. Hermes trained thousands of simulated ducks on that course until the validated policy was ready to run on the real robot in the physical world. At Nous, we believe open source is a practical tool as much as a philosophical ideal. It gives users the ability to build powerful, complex workflows chaining numerous local+cloud models, devices, and tools themselves instead of waiting for a company to enable them.

I spent 48 hours in SF hanging out with billionaires, data labs and AI founders and execs running $1B to $100B companies. My observations: 1. Sooo MANY stories of data brokers making like $2M a WEEK selling company data to labs. I can't tell if it's the beginning or a bubble, and I kept wondering which niches are left. Digging into it actively. 2. At dinner, someone asked the table, "If a new model drops next month, does your company get better or worse?" HALF the table went quiet! I think that's the best question to ask about any AI startup right now. 3. The bar people talk about now is hitting $1B in revenue in 12 months (I guess that's the new unicorn?). What I didn't hear much about is retention. AI revenue can come in fast and leave fast, and I think we're going to see a lot of stories of AI companies with huge revenue and terrible retention. 4. It's pretty clear we're living through the reinvention of the computer. The model is the CPU, the harness is the operating system, and skills and plugins are the apps. Thinking about it that way makes it easier to see where the whitespace is. 5. We're maybe 12 months from an agent that can watch you work for a week and then do your job without any instructions. The screen recording plus agent memory plus local model combination makes this possible right now. 6. Agent harnesses feel like the new GPT wrappers, in a good way, especially vertical ones. The best teams I talked to treat the model as swappable. One founder walked me through routing different models to different jobs: one for taste and visuals, a cheaper one for the everyday stuff, another for text. They use prompts they can move across models over fine-tuning, and A/B test the output on what users actually do with it: do they edit it, export it, share it? A vertical harness is basically four things: the connectors for that industry's data, evals written by people who know the work, rules for what the agent can and can't touch, and a clean screen for a human to review. The model is maybe 20% of it. 7. There's a lot of reverse engineering going on/cloning going on more than I've ever seen. People are decompiling software and rebuilding it with agents, and someone showed a suite of like 10 apps that are worth $5B+ each all that he cloned open source. Me and everyone are still thinking through what it means when software gets this easy to copy. 8. My guess is the value moves to data. If the software can be rebuilt quickly, what's worth paying for in a legacy SaaS company is the years of customer data and workflows inside it. Some SaaS companies are secretly data companies. Gets me thinking about how do you truly value data for this saas companies? Like if we were buying these dying saas companies at 2x ARR before (as example), maybe there is a better metric. Idk, just thinking out loud here. 9. It feels like a good chunk of legacy software won't make it to the agentic era, especially anything built around people clicking through a lot of screens. 10. Every company I talked to wants to pipe its internal data into one place and expose it to agents through MCP. Then they look at the data and realize it's a mess: five versions of the same customer, old Slack channels, PDFs nobody can search. Cleaning that up feels like a big consulting opportunity! 11. A lot of founders are building the basic building blocks for agents: APIs, data layers and tools. Some of the companies I saw barely have a UI because the main user is an agent. I really believe the startups that build primitives to this agentic era will do extremely well. Building blocks is the best way to think about it. 12. Labs can get plenty of training data, but it's harder to get real examples of agents failing inside companies. Whoever has those logs has something valuable. 13. Someone running a big consumer company told me the next fight is over memory. The model that remembers the most about you wins, and the smartest model matters less than people think. 14. Physical AI came up a lot. Astra I think was the first model that got people into AI can actually do CAD, and I think a lot of people are thinking what does vibe manufacturing really look like. The line I keep thinking about came from a robotics founder: the hardest problems in AI are deployment problems now, not research problems. Their robots work on their own, call a human when they get stuck, and every one of those calls becomes training data. 15. Cybersecurity companies are having a moment and are actually cool companies to build now, especially the ones that clean up after a breach. Every agent with access to your systems is a new door into your company, and a lot of those doors were left open. 16. Some startups are worth more dead than alive now. A shutdown company with 5 years of Slack, email and code can get paid for licensing all of it. I wouldn't be surprised if founders start factoring that into when they shut down. 17. People are starting to talk about monetizing the agent web. It feels really early, but when the most popular user of the internet is an agent, what startups should you be building? 18. I think agent insurance is coming. Once an agent makes an expensive mistake, insurers will want audits before they cover anyone. 19. Several people said the hire they want most is someone with taste who can write evals. The models are getting good at generating ideas, so the hard part is judging which ones are good. 20. New trend I observed: startup raises VC, uses venture dollars to become a creator, startup fails, founder falls back on being a full-time creator and incubates other products bootstrapped. 21. Getting SIGNIFICANT distribution is HARD right now. Founders are sponsoring buses, buying billboards like crazy and throwing parties with famous DJs to get noticed. Kinda feels dotcom era in that sense. Attention is what's scarce! The growth guy going viral sharing his UGC strategy from Wispr Flow is a good example. It's the sauce everyone wants, and I truly believe there are probably only 50 people on the planet who know how to scale these types of businesses efficiently in this era. Always good to get that dose of SF. I felt sooo lucky to have such an incredible trip during such an incredible time in building businesses. Surreal in so many ways. Happy to be home and locked in. Until next time!

We were able to fine tune an open weight model (Qwen3.5-9B) on proprietary internal data at @coinbase, and it out performed frontier models, at much lower cost and speed, for a specialized task (fraud prevention in this case). I think we'll see more of this pattern inside companies. The frontier models are amazing generalists. But increasingly you'll see specialist models out perform on more narrow tasks, either working on teams, or by themselves. We're making it easy to fine tune models internally for our employees. We even have a skill for it in our internal harness that makes it easy to spin these up and start training them: "/fine-tune-and-serve-llm I want to fine-tune Qwen for payments risk review. help me get started" I imagine we'll have some backend services that could be replaced entirely by this new architecture.

This is the thing I've been wanting to fit into a sermon for years. Jesus didn't choose the ROCK in Matthew 16 by accident. The Bible is amazing.

Saw this in the news today. I am very proud of my “controversial” Pastor. “A pastor doesn’t need to try to be controversial, he just needs to read Bible verses.” Seeing people say false things about him bugs me sometimes. It’s to be expected. But I can tell you what I’ve SEEN with my eyes: This is a good and godly man. He cares deeply about his church and his role as a pastor. If you put an opportunity in front of him, unless it results in reaching more people with the Gospel & doesn’t impact his role as a pastor, be prepared to hear NO. He loves his family as his first ministry. “Pastor Josh, we really should do X, Y, and Z.” “Sorry, can’t do that, that’s my date night with Jana” or “no can do, I want to put my kids down tonight.” People will say he wants to be an “influencer,” but not realize he doesn’t spend his time posting the videos you see on social media. This dude is SERIOUS about his mission and he’s landing haymakers for the Kingdom of God at Lakepointe Chruch and @TheLiveFreePod — it’s no wonder why the world sees him as “controversial.” “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.” - John 15:18 (No, I’m not his brother so this isn’t nepotism)