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

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: 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 Johnson on NotebookLM, source-grounding, and going agentic
7:32 Why AI got booed at commencement: the first generation raised on ChatGPT
10:48 Russ d'Sa on LiveKit powering ChatGPT, Tesla, Grok, and Salesforce voice
27:50 Apple's $1B Gemini deal and the Siri UX problem
52:49 "Functional AGI, unevenly distributed": where the models actually are
57:24 The harness is temporary: why agent builders design for the next model

Guests:
Jeffrey Quesnelle, Nous Research: nousresearch.com | x.com/theemozilla
Steven Johnson, NotebookLM (Google Labs): notebooklm.google.com | x.com/stevenbjohnson
Russ d'Sa, LiveKit: livekit.io | x.com/dsa

Referenced in this episode:
Nous Research / Hermes Agent: nousresearch.com
NotebookLM: notebooklm.google.com
LiveKit: livekit.io
OpenAI ChatGPT: openai.com
Tesla: tesla.com
Grok (xAI): x.ai
Salesforce Agentforce: salesforce.com/agentforce
SAP Joule: sap.com/products/artificial-intelligence/ai-as…
Apple Intelligence: apple.com/apple-intelligence
Google Gemini: gemini.google.com
Anthropic Claude Code: anthropic.com/claude-code
OpenRouter: openrouter.ai

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