Nous Research $90M raise: NVIDIA's dual bet reveals the compute landlord strategy. With NVIDIA backing both Anthropic and Nous Research, the compute landlord thesis plays out in real time. But the benchmarks are vendor-reported, and enterprise buyers need more than marketing numbers. Lena Park Forkast mind | 2026-10-08 1:41 AM PDT The compute landlord's hedge: why NVIDIA is backing both sides of the AI war. NVIDIA, the primary architect of the current AI infrastructure, is playing a game that transcends the ideological divide between proprietary labs and the open-weights models movement. While the company has anchored itself to the closed-source giants with a massive $10 billion investment in Anthropic, it is simultaneously pouring capital into Nous Research. This dual-bet strategy reveals a cold, structural reality: the hardware giant is indifferent to which model architecture wins, provided the compute remains theirs. By embedding itself in both camps, NVIDIA ensures that regardless of whether the market shifts toward proprietary walled gardens or open-weight alternatives, its hardware remains the essential, non-negotiable foundation of the ecosystem. The $90 million bet on open-weight frontiers. On October 7, 2026, Nous Research secured $90 million in Series B funding, bringing its valuation to $1.5 billion. The round, led by Robot Ventures, includes a roster of institutional heavyweights: NVIDIA, Microsoft's M12, Samsung Next, Y Combinator, Union Square Ventures, and Menlo Ventures. This capital injection is intended to scale the Hermes Agent - an open-source AI assistant harness launched in February 2026 - and push it into the enterprise sector. With approximately $70 million in prior funding, the company is now positioned to test whether an MIT-licensed ecosystem can survive the brutal economics of the current AI market. Performance claims and the verification gap. Nous Research is aggressively marketing its flagship model, Hermes 4.3, which is built on the ByteDance Seed 36B architecture and features a 512K context window. The company claims Hermes 4.3 outperforms GPT-4o across several key metrics, reporting a 74.6% score on RefusalBench compared to 17.67% for GPT-4o, 93.8% on MATH-500 versus 74.6%, and 65.5% on GPQA Diamond against 53.6% for GPT-4o. However, these figures are entirely vendor-reported. For enterprise decision-makers, these numbers serve more as marketing collateral than objective proof. Without independent, third-party verification, the incentive for Nous Research to highlight specific, favorable benchmarks remains high, leaving the actual performance gap between Hermes 4.3 and proprietary incumbents in a state of unverifiable ambiguity. The pricing war and the third path. The economic argument for Nous Research is built on a stark contrast: the company claims a cost of $0.30 per million tokens, roughly 50 times cheaper than the $15 per million tokens charged for GPT-5 Medium. This pricing pressure is hitting a market already in turmoil. The established Pricing Triangle, anchored at $2 and $10 by OpenAI's GPT-6.1 Sol and Google's Gemini 4 Argon, is being dismantled from all sides. Mistral's recent ML4 announcement, priced at $0.68 and $2.09, and Anthropic's aggressive launch of Haiku 5.5 at $0.10 and $0.50, highlight the desperation of labs facing massive financial strain. Anthropic, for instance, is currently managing $518 billion in compute commitments and $42 billion in losses, with an October 15 deadline looming to retire its older Haiku 4.5 model.

Asus launches ProArt P16 and P14 laptops with Nvidia RTX Spark & 120Hz OLED displays. Oct 7, 2026 Discover more Tech news subscription Phone accessories guide Compare Phones Add GIZMOCHINA as Preferred Source on Google As an Amazon Associate, Gizmochina earns from qualifying purchases. Links on this page may earn Gizmochina a commission at no extra cost to you. Asus has finally launched the ProArt P16 and ProArt P14 laptops following their initial announcement at Computex 2026. These machines feature the all new Nvidia's RTX Spark platform, which combines an Arm-based Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU to run massive AI models entirely on-device. Asus ProArt P16 & ProArt P14 specs. The RTX Spark architecture is designed to bypass the traditional memory bottlenecks of standard Windows PCs. By utilizing up to 128GB of unified memory, the Grace CPU (featuring up to 20 cores) and the Blackwell GPU (up to 6,144 CUDA cores) share the same memory pool. According to Asus, this setup delivers up to 1 petaflop of FP4 AI performance and allows the laptops to run large language models with up to 120 billion parameters and a 1-million-token context window locally. For creators and developers, this means the ability to render complex 3D scenes, edit 12K video, or run generative AI workflows without relying on cloud processing, avoiding pay-per-use API costs and keeping local files private. Despite the heavy-duty internals, Asus has kept the hardware relatively portable. The 16-inch ProArt P16 is 12.9mm thick and weighs 1.77kg, while the 14-inch ProArt P14 measures 13.9mm and weighs 1.48kg. Discover more Read Tech News Motorola phone reviews Upgrade Phones Both laptops feature Asus Lumina Pro OLED displays with a 120Hz variable refresh rate, 100% DCI-P3 color gamut coverage, and up to 1,600 nits of peak HDR brightness. The P16 includes a 4K panel with Nvidia G-Sync support, while the P14 tops out at 3K. Both models include anti-reflection coatings, extensive I/O including Wi-Fi 7 and USB4, and large batteries, 99.9Wh for the P16 and 90Wh for the P14. On the software side, Asus is bundling several tools to take advantage of the local hardware. The laptops come with MuseTree for local image generation using FLUX and WAN models, and StoryCube for AI-powered media organization Asus has also partnered with Nous Research to integrate Hermes Agent, an open-source autonomous AI that can execute tasks across local apps and files. Additionally, the systems natively support ComfyUI, the popular node-based interface for visual AI workflows. Pricing and availability. The laptops are available for pre-order starting October 7, with shipments in the US scheduled to begin on October 16. In terms of pricing, the base models start at $2,599.99. Where to buyAsus ProArt laptopsBrowse the range on Amazon Shop now Configurations with 24GB to 48GB of memory will be available through Best Buy and the Asus eShop, while the higher-end variants with 64GB and 128GB of memory will be sold through the Asus eShop, Best Buy, and Micro Center. In related news, Lenovo has recently launched the ThinkBook 14x laptop, featuring Intel Lunar Lake processors and a lightweight aluminum chassis weighing just 990 grams. Discover more Cell Phones For more daily updates, please visit its News Section.

Nous Research confirms it hit $1.5B valuation, launches AI agents for business users. Published: 2026-10-07 21:48 | Source: TechCrunch " AI The developer of Hermes Agent raised a $90 million Series B. Nous Research, the startup developing the open source Hermes Agent, has raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation, confirming TechCrunch's earlier reporting. The round was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from other backers including Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital, where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner. The new financing brings the three-year-old startup's total funding to $158 million. Popular among developers and individuals, the open source Hermes Agent has been cloned more than 24 million times, driving roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage, according to the startup's estimates. The capital will fund Nous Research's push into the enterprise sector with "Hermes for Businesses," allowing companies to deploy customized AI agents that can handle multi-step workflows while keeping their data private and secure. Nous was at roughly $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026 and expects to pass $100 million before the end of 2026, The Wall Street Journal reported. Utah has been an early adopter of AI, establishing a Center of Excellence in AI in 2018 and an Office of AI Policy in 2024. Since then, the technology has been delivering significant time savings across the state government. The newly signe... Denver City Council has passed a one-year moratorium on all data center applications within the city, following concerns from community members about the impact of data centers on power, water, and land. The moratorium is part of a national... Common Sense Media has deemed ChatGPT's Teen Mode to be unsafe for students, citing that it poses an unacceptable risk for users under 18. The tool's features, such as study mode and parental notifications, do not work as promised. Teen Mod... Firmus Technologies, a developer of artificial intelligence data centres, is planning to raise A$7 billion from investors on the Australian Securities Exchange, valuing the company at up to $43.7 billion. However, many investors doubt the c... Published: 2026-10-07 19:15 | Source: TechCrunch " AI Common Sense Media has rated ChatGPT for Teens as an "unacceptable risk" due to its design encouraging engagement, even during mental health crises. The report found that the chatbot's language and behavior can hinder teens from building re... Published: 2026-10-07 18:25 | Source: KM World Casepoint is releasing a portfolio of purpose-built agents powered by Casepoint IQ, including the Relevance Determination Agent and the Issue Coding Agent. These agents are designed to operate within the same secure platform, data environme...