Jensen Huang closes his GTC Berlin keynote with Nous Research's open source Hermes Agent training a Hugging Face Microduck robot from a laptop
Jensen closed his GTC Berlin 2026 keynote with this Hermes Agent demo as the finale. He introduced it by saying the way to build an agent is to ask an agent to build it for you, so he installed and set up a customized Hermes in one prompt. Then he used Hermes, running on @nvidia RTX Spark, to create a simulated training environment for the @huggingface Microduck. Hermes planned an obstacle course with Nemotron and had GPT-6 Astra build it using FreeCAD, Omniverse libraries, Blender, Newton, and Isaac Lab. Hermes trained thousands of simulated ducks on that course until the validated policy was ready to run on the real robot in the physical world. At Nous, we believe open source is a practical tool as much as a philosophical ideal. It gives users the ability to build powerful, complex workflows chaining numerous local+cloud models, devices, and tools themselves instead of waiting for a company to enable them.
Context
An open source agent headlining NVIDIA's keynote shows agents moving from chat into running full robotics workflows across local and cloud hardware.
Nous Research is an AI lab that makes open models and Hermes Agent, an open source agent harness. This is Nous describing NVIDIA's demo of its own product; NVIDIA's blog confirms Huang showed it during the keynote.
Deep dive
On October 21, Nous Research posted that Jensen Huang closed his GTC Berlin 2026 keynote with a Hermes Agent demo as the finale. It said Huang introduced it by saying the way to build an agent is to ask an agent to build it for you, then installed and set up a customized Hermes in one prompt.
According to Nous, Huang then used Hermes, running on NVIDIA RTX Spark, to create a simulated training environment for Hugging Face's Microduck robot. Hermes planned an obstacle course with Nemotron and had GPT 6 Astra build it using FreeCAD, Omniverse libraries, Blender, Newton and Isaac Lab, then trained thousands of simulated ducks until a validated policy was ready for the real robot. Nous said open source lets users chain local and cloud models, devices and tools themselves.
NVIDIA's blog says Huang showed agents on RTX Spark training the Microduck using Isaac Lab, Hermes Agent and Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B. The video shows parallel training in simulation and small duck robots on stage. RTX Spark is the Windows laptop platform NVIDIA launched on October 16, rated at 1 petaflop of AI compute. This was a staged keynote demo, not an independent test.
What to expect next
Watch whether Nous or NVIDIA publish the full workflow so developers can reproduce it on their own hardware. The demo could bring more users to Hermes Agent and to Hugging Face's Microduck kit. Also watch for other agent makers to show robotics workflows on local hardware, and for NVIDIA to push RTX Spark as a platform for personal agents. Hugging Face may see more developers buy the Microduck kit to try the same sim to real training.