Episode Details

Wohoo, hey ya’ll, Alex here,

I'm back from the desert (pic at the end) and what a great feeling it is to be back in the studio to talk about everything that happened in AI!

It's been a pretty full week (or two) in AI, with Coding agent space heating up, Grok entering the ring and taking over free tokens, Codex 10xing usage and Anthropic... well, we'll get to Anthropic.

Today on the show we had Roger and Bhavesh from Nous Research cover the awesome Hermes 4 release and the new PokerBots benchmark, then we had a returning favorite, Kwindla Hultman Kramer, to talk about the GA of RealTime voice from OpenAI.

Plus we got some massive funding news, some drama with model quality on Claude Code, and some very exciting news right here from CoreWeave aquiring OpenPipe! 👏 So grab your beverage of choice, settle in (or skip to the part that interests you) and let's take a look at the last week (or two) in AI!

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Open Source: Soulful Models and Poker-Playing Agents

This week did not disappoint as it comes to Open Source! Our friends at Nous Research released the 14B version of Hermes 4, after releasing the 405B and 70B versions last week. This company continues to excel in finetuning models for powerful, and sometimes just plain weird (in a good way) usecases.

Nous Hermes 4 (14B, 70B, 405B) and the Quest for a "Model Soul" (X, HF)

Roger and Bhavash from Nous came to announce the release of the smaller (14B) version of Hermes 4, and cover the last weeks releases of the larger 70B and 405B brothers. Hermes series of finetunes was always on our radar, as unique data mixes turned them into uncensored, valuable and creative models and unlocked a bunch of new use-cases.

But the wildest part? They told us they intentionally stopped training the model not when reasoning benchmarks plateaued, but when they felt it started to "lose its model soul." They monitor the entropy and chaos in the model's chain-of-thought, and when it became too sterile and predictable, they hit the brakes to preserve that creative spark. This focus on qualities beyond raw benchmark scores is why Hermes 4 is showing some really interesting generalization, performing exceptionally well on benchmarks like EQBench3, which tests emotional and interpersonal understanding. It's a model that's primed for RL not just in math and code, but in creative writing, role-play, and deeper, more "awaken" conversations. It’s a soulful model that's just fun to talk to.

Nous Husky Hold'em Bench: Can Your LLM Win at Poker? (Bench)

As if a soulful model wasn't enough, the Nous team also dropped one of the most creative new evals I've seen in a while: Husky Hold'em Bench. We had Bhavesh, one of its creators, join the show to explain. This isn't a benchmark where the LLM plays poker directly. Instead, the LLM has to write a Python poker botfrom scratch, under time and memory constraints, which then competes against bots written by other LLMs in a high-stakes tournament. Very interesting approach, and we love creative benchmarking here at ThursdAI!

This is a brilliant way to test for true strategic reasoning and planning, not just pattern matching. It's an "evergreen" benchmark that gets harder as the models get better. Early results are fascinating: Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus are currently leading the pack, but Hermes 4 is the top op