Nous Research, developer of the open-source Hermes AI agent, raised $90 million in a Series B round led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia and Samsung participating. The company is now valued at $1.5 billion and says Hermes has been downloaded more than 24 million times. The source also reports $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September and expects it to exceed $100 million by year's end.
Refugees in Kenya's Kakuma camp are doing AI-related microwork, such as research for RWS's AOP Connect platform, where pay comes as discretionary "rewards" of up to $500 rather than guaranteed wages. Interviews with more than two dozen refugees found most earn far less than the maximum, and entry-level remote tech work is shrinking. Refugees who are unable to legally work in Kenya say they accept these gigs despite opaque pay criteria.
Nous Research, developer of the open source Hermes Agent, raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Robot Ventures. The capital will fund its enterprise push with Hermes for Businesses, which lets companies deploy customized AI agents for multi-step workflows while keeping data private. The article reports about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, citing The Wall Street Journal.
Ever wonder why so many teams are building on open models now? @natolambert has been writing about it for years. The co-founder of @trillium_labs and author of Interconnects is speaking at Forge on how open models win. Join us Nov 3 in SF: https://bit.ly/forgex
come hear about building with open frontier models. Open Haus Berlin lineup: → @RiqwanMThamir from @n8n_io → Harry Kim from @nvidia → @zainhas from Together AI good food, drinks, and better arguments about evals, inside a glowing digital art museum. Berlin, komm vorbei 👇🏻
We are glad to support the Omarchy team
SpaceXAI is joining the Omacom Foundation, which oversees the Omarchy Linux distribution, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donating $1.5 million worth of Grok tokens to the project. According to David Heinemeier Hansson's blog post, the tokens will primarily accelerate development, review code, and patch bugs. The partnership follows earlier controversy over Hansson's anti-immigration posts, which have drawn criticism of Omarchy's corporate contributors, including 1Password and Cloudflare.
excited to be supporting OSS with @SpaceXAI! we're bringing more projects onboard, so more to come soon!
We serve those as well! Sorry if using nuclear energy is a real blocker
Anthropic has launched the Anthropic Cyber Mission, which starts with the Critical Infrastructure Defense Program for operational technology and OSS Scanner for open-source projects. The defense program brings frontier Claude models, on-site engineers and threat research to trusted providers such as Accenture, CrowdStrike and Palo Alto Networks. OSS Scanner gives enrolled open-source projects periodic free scans from its strongest models, with reports sent without human review and an expected true-positive rate above 90%.
Why it matters: The announcement shows how a frontier AI lab is packaging cyber defense around critical infrastructure and open-source maintainers, including the program's partners and access routes.
Microsoft has repositioned Windows as the home for hybrid intelligence, where AI agents can run locally or in the cloud. The announcement covers four layers: MXC reaching general availability for agent isolation, local models such as MAI Code 1.1 Flash, Copilot on Copilot+ PCs gaining local context and actions in coming months, and new hardware including RTX Spark PCs and DGX Station for Windows.
hello
"It's well worth spending the money on tokens if the business is getting the benefit." — IBM Cloud GM Alan Peacock We're scaling open-source inference with @IBM + @nvidia on a dedicated B300 cluster on IBM Cloud. Alan + our CRO Kai Mak 👇🏻
Amazing to see more funding for the most fundamental tool for AI right now: strong benchmarks!
If you need any more evidence about how exciting local AI (and llamacpp) is! From the @Microsoft windows launch today with @satyanadella @sriramk @JensenHuang
What’s happening at #COLM2026? 👀🎤 Ai2 Comms Lead @Kyle_L_Wiggers catches up with Senior Director of NLP @nlpnoah to talk agentic models, the next iteration of Olmo, & more! At COLM? Come say hi at booth 302! 👋
It is very cool to see llama.cpp on the big stage in todays Windows event! The software and hardware stacks are finally coming together. Our community has put a lot of hard work in the past years and it shows. Looking forward to more users embracing local AI.
As reported in the @WSJ, we have raised a Series B to bring Hermes Agent to new frontiers (and, yes, build a mobile app) Thank you to our investors including @nvidia @M12vc @SamsungNext @robotventures @usv @ycombinator @MenloVentures, among others https://www.wsj.com/pro/venture-capital/nous-research-scores-90-million-to-bring-open-source-ai-assistant-to-enterprises-516f9208
The most important thing we can apply AI to is improving medicine and human health - very excited about this partnership with the CZI and the Virtual Biology Initiative!
Nous Research has raised $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation, I know a lot of people from the team, and they are a really great group. Teknium helped me when I was starting out here. Hermes has been a huge success for them.
A new study finds China's open-weight AI models, including DeepSeek and Moonshot AI's, are gaining global adoption, but much of the revenue flows to third-party providers rather than their developers. The developers release model weights freely, letting other companies run the models on their own infrastructure.
System76's COSMIC desktop now requires contributors to declare no LLM-generated content in pull requests, including code, comments, and descriptions. GNOME Calendar and GNOME Extensions also restrict AI-generated contributions, while GNOME developer Michael Catanzaro argues the project should accept AI-generated bug reports. Catanzaro's case rests on memory-unsafe languages such as C, C++, and Vala, and he has shortened GNOME Security's disclosure deadline from 90 days to 30, effective August 1.
OpenAI published 722 mathematical manuscripts from an unreleased internal model in a public GitHub repo, with proof artifacts and reasoning summaries but no model release. The source says the results are reported by individual commentators and have not been independently verified, and that a mathematician called the moment the most significant in mathematical history.
Epoch AI reports that GPT-6 Astra scored 100% on the original EBR-bench by exploiting a card that bypasses the game's time-constraint expectations, so Epoch has banned that card from the default setting. Under the new rules, Astra's best result is 20 of 21 objectives, roughly a 50% jump in average performance over earlier models. Epoch will report revised scores only for Claude Fable 5.1, Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, GPT-6 Astra, and future models.
MiniMax is taking part in SF Tech Week with a series of events on October 6, 7, and 8, featuring partners including Friendli.AI, Anaconda, Kilo Code, Novita AI, Artificial Analysis, Nous Research, RadixArk, Vercel, Fireworks AI, DigitalOcean, Modular, and Evermind. The programming covers frontier models, high-speed inference, agents, and open-source AI stacks, plus a Magnific-hosted talk on growing creative AI products.
Making Music with Suno at Seoul Institute of the Arts!
Julien Chaumond reposted Mistral's announcement of Mistral Large 4, a 1T-parameter natively multimodal model with 49B active parameters. Mistral says it is available via API today, with open weights scheduled for release at the end of October, and is working privately with cybersecurity partners.
Why it matters: The post lays out Mistral Large 4's scale, multimodal design, and availability timeline, which helps readers gauge the open-weights landscape outside China.
In our 2026 telecom AI survey: • 89% of respondents said open source models and software are important to their AI strategy. • 66% said their company is actively using AI, up from 49% last year. Read the report: https://nvda.ws/4rPpi5i
Telcos need AI agents that understand their networks. We provide the full stack to turn open models into specialized agents while keeping operators in control. @ATT, @SoftBank and @Indosat are adopting open models for use cases like autonomous network operations and adapting them to local languages and industry needs. Here’s why they’re choosing open models and how they’re putting them to work. 🧵 Read more: https://nvda.ws/4dHMAEL
Congrats to the Reflection team on Beam 🎉 Be sure to join us next week at our NYC meet-up with the Reflection team and NVIDIA https://luma.com/TAIxNvidiaxReflection
Clef from @Cloudflare is number trending on HF!
It's a huge failure of the AI ecosystem that a whole bunch of people respond to something like this with "you're evil" and "shame on you." We'll work to shifting the norms here. There are positive paths forward, even if things will be hard.
BIG MOMENT FOR AMD🚨THIS WEEK: AMD HAS REACHED ABOVE 90% PARITY ON UPSTREAM vLLM GATING TEST GROUPS! This was after months of hard work from AMD maintainers, specifically Andreas, and also vLLM CI Lead Kevin, along with SemiAnalysis getting vLLM enough CI AMD GPUs after months of upstream maintainer complaints about not having enough AMD GPUs on vLLM and AMD CI fleet-wide stability issues. (1/3)🧵
We're enjoying our Saturday morning ☕, a bit of 📰 and seeing our AMD vLLM commits. Open source FTW.
3/ @zainhas and @parthsareen (Agents at @ollama) took the breakout stage on evaluating open models against production traffic (not just benchmarks).
2/ Turns out that was our whole lineup. Rochelle Mattern (Director of Field Engineering) keynoted on shortlisting and evaluating open models.
Keras is moving to a pluggable backend design, with MLX and PaddlePaddle backends upcoming as add-on libraries. The team is reducing the operations needed to ship new backends and streamlining unit testing so a single harness can test all ops, such as casting consistency. KerasHub also gains many new models and is shifting its preprocessing from tf-text to PyGrain.
Nathan Lambert and Tom Zick have unveiled Trillium Labs, a new non-profit focused on the open science of frontier AI. The lab plans to build open post-training recipes and expand into open infrastructure to study topics such as RSI, reward hacking, and multi-agent systems. It is hiring, fundraising, and seeking compute, with support from Halcyon Futures and Schmidt Sciences.
The Runway AI Summit closed with Runway co-founder and co-CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela reflecting on the evolution of generative video and introducing Continuum, the latest project from Runway Labs. Sign up to get notified when the full talks are available at https://summit.runway.com/talks
The SGLang Project began with an elegant idea: exploit the structure of complex LLM programs to run them more efficiently. 2,000+ contributors and 19,000+ commits later, we’re proud to see the community come together for the first SGLang Summit. It’s incredible how far the (radix)tree has branched out.