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! ThursdAI - Recaps of the most high signal AI weekly spaces is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Open Source: Soulful Models and Poker-Playing AgentsThis 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 open-source model.More Open Source GoodnessThe hits just kept on coming this week. Tencent open-sourced Hunyuan-MT-7B, a translation model that swept the WMT2025 competition and rivals GPT-4.1 on some benchmarks. Having a small, powerful, specialized model like this is huge for anyone doing large-scale data translation for training or needing fast on-device capabilities.From Switzerland, we got Apertus-8B and 70B, a set of fully open (Apache 2.0 license, open data, open training recipes!) multilingual models trained on a massive 15 trillion tokens across 1,800 languages. It’s fantastic to see this level of transparency and contribution from European institutions.And Alibaba’s Tongyi Lab released WebWatcher, a powerful multimodal research agent that can plan steps, use a suite of tools (web search, OCR, code interpreter), and is setting new state-of-the-art results on tough visual-language benchmarks, often beating models like GPT-4o and Gemini.All links are in the TL;DR at the endBREAKING NEWS: Google Drops Embedding Gemma 308M (X, HF, Try It)Just as we were live on the show, news broke from our friends at Google. They've released Embedding Gemma, a new family of open-source embedding models. This is a big deal because they are tiny—the smallest is only 300M parameters and takes just 200MB to run—but they are topping the MTEB leaderboard for models under 500M parameters. For anyone building RAG pipelines, especially for on-device or mobile-first applications, ...
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