Nous Research CEO Announces AI Agent Independently Completes 79,000-Character Novel Writing

Gate News reports that on March 20, Nous Research co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Quesnelle announced that their developed Hermes Agent independently completed the writing and typesetting of the novel “The Second Son of the House of Bells,” totaling 19 chapters and 79,456 words. He distributed printed copies to attendees at NVIDIA GTC, stating that creating an AI system capable of telling captivating stories “has always been his dream.” The entire process was built by the Agent itself, divided into four stages: the first stage involves cyclically generating the world view, characters, outline, and tone until the scores meet the standard; the second stage drafts each chapter, discarding and rewriting those with scores below 6.0; the third stage involves adversarial editing and reader panel simulation; the fourth stage submits the work to Claude Opus for review in a loop, adopting the dual roles of “literary critic + fiction professor,” until no significant improvements can be made. Quesnelle stated that this framework draws on Andrej Karpathy’s proposed Autoresearch “modify-evaluate-retain/discard” cycle and extends it to novel creation. Karpathy responded, “This idea is great. Although it’s difficult to verify strictly, with dedication, the results should be promising.” Nous Research is known for its open-source Hermes series models and has previously proposed the YaRN context expansion method.