Welcome to another AI by Aakash. I follow the AI news so you don’t have to.
Hermes shipped Bot mode this week, and it’s a legit competitor to Grok Bot. No wonder Hermes is going crazy on the OpenRouter leaderboard:
It’s basically advertised as a free version of Grok Bot.
So how does it ACTUALLY compare?
That’s today’s deep dive. First, a word from our sponsors + this week’s top news.
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This Week’s AI News
The Week’s Top News: Stripe just made a massive AI acquisition
Speaking of OpenRouter, OpenRouter is this week’s top story. Stripe acquired it. for over $7B. That’s more than 5x its valuation just 3 months ago:
OpenRouter earns a 5.5% fee when customers load credits to spend on inference across 400+ models. That’s nearly double Stripe’s 2.9%, and it’s on dollars previously outside Stripe’s ecosystem: those flowing to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
OpenRouter itself runs on Stripe, so Stripe has known everything about OpenRouter’s growth curve since the start.
And it’s a true hockeystick. OpenRouter spiked to 25 trillion tokens a week across 8 million users, up 5x from 6 months ago.
With this acquisiion, Stripe has strengthened its toll booth for internet commerce.
The other news that mattered
Electricians are coming out as a major beneficiary of the AI boom. Electrical work is literally 45-70% of the cost of building a data center. So 20-something electricians in Texas with no degree are earning $280,000 a year.
If you didn’t believe Chinese models have completely taken the lead on Open-Source, the data is now in. Qwen out-downloaded Meta’s Llama nearly 9-to-1 this year (~2 billion downloads to 227 million).
China has already finished a year of compulsory AI curriculum. Meanwhile, the US and Europe are still debating AI detectors.
If you were looking for a high-impact use case of AI in non-AI companies, look no further than McDonald’s (seriously can’t believe I’m typing that). They’re producing 515-page reports on customers that exactly predict how much you’ll spend in the coming weeks and months.
Anthropic looks set to raise $100B at a $2T valuation as soon as next month.
Launches:
Berkeley AI dating startup Ditto achieved 160,000+ signups for its app that not only automatically picks their match, it actually sends them a fully planned date itinerary.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has turned their Codex rate limiter into the best growth loops in AI. It’s now past 20M users of Codex and reset limits yet again.
Feature releases:
Anthropic put editable design artboards inside Claude Code. Now you don’t have to handoff the figma designs to the developer to build. Everything can be done in Claude Code.
OpenAI shipped ChatGPT inside iMessage on the Mac. This is 41 days after Apple sued it for trade secret theft. They’re suing each other with one hand and shipping together with the other.
Deep Dive
Hermes Bot Mode.
Grok Bot and Hermes Bot are currently fighting over who has the best agents mode. So let’s find out.
Hermes Bot mode gives us the same roster of named bots. But one single difference will matter to you every month:
All agents stay with you locally (even when you stop using Hermes).
So I rebuilt my fleet inside Hermes Bot mode this week, so that I can really test the outputs, and build you a guide on how to use it well.
Today’s Deep Dive
What Bot mode actually is
Your first Bot in 10 minutes
3 ways to use your roster
Where it beats Grok bot and where it looses
1. What Hermes Bot actually is
Hermes is a free, opensource agent (I covered it all the way back in April.)
Recently it has released it desktop app for Mac, and this week its Bot mode came out. It’s basically Grok Bot.
Grok Bot was $200/mo when I wrote about it last week. Since then, they’ve released a $60/mo plan. But it’s still basically a $60 vs free agent.
So, a $60 Agent per month vs a free agent is worth comparing on which gives you the best productivity and that’s exactly what we are planning to today.
2. Your first Hermes Bot in 10 minutes
Install Hermes Desktop from here.
You need to connect with a provider of your choice when prompted in the signin page or you can skip and go to Settings > Providers > Accounts to setup later.
Click on create + new Bot on the dashboard and then write the name, title and description. Write the description thoughtfully because the bots use it to route their work.
All the bots that require internal handoff and communication with each other use this feature of create Bot Group and @ mention specific bots that should converse with each other. This is the perfect way to use the roster of bots together.
I start scheduling all of my bots as routines or scheduled jobs for all the repetitive tasks I find over a period of time
3. 5 ways to use your roster
Now it’s time for you to build your agent roster.
Give every Bot a clear job and its own brain, I use good reasoning models like claude/gpt-sol for an architect or orchestrator Bot and for research-heavy work. For simpler, repetitive jobs, a fast local model just does well enough.
I advice folks on building bots around skills not just individual tasks. A “do everything” Bot sounds convenient but it quickly collects unrelated context and starts mixing projects together and that’s when responses get slower & more likely to hallucinate.
I don’t advise putting all the bots in the same group chat because it increases the chances of hallucination, and group chats work best when there is actually a real agent to agent talking happening.
a large roster typically does not make the agents work better. It is the fact that a few bots with clear jobs are usually more helpful than just creating a swarm of bots that need constant management
Where it beats Grok Bot
There are several clear areas Hermes Bot Mode beats Grok Bot and we are going to see them with examples:
Grok Bot has no export functionality, once you stop using the app the agent memory is gone
Grok Bot needs a $60-$200 plan and Hermes is free.
A major advantage of Hermes over Grok Bot is the accessibility of models. In Grok Bot, you are always restricted to the Grok models, but you can use Fable or Sol 5.6 for long thinking tasks in Hermes
You can clone existing bot profiles in Hermes instead of starting from scratch every time.
Bot mode difference from normal AI agent
Personal takeaways
I would pick Grok for speed and Hermes for model choice, separate memory, source control, and ownership of the files.
Here is where I land
That’s all for today. See you next week.