AI Agent Writes Entire 79,000-Word Novel Itself: Nous Research Co-Founder CEO "Dreams Coming True," Karpathy: "This Idea is Great"

According to 1M AI News monitoring, Nous Research Co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Quesnelle announced that their developed Hermes Agent autonomously completed the entire writing and formatting of the novel "The Second Son of the House of Bells," totaling 19 chapters and 79,456 words. He distributed printed copies to on-site attendees at the NVIDIA GTC event, stating that building an AI system that can tell engaging stories has "always been his dream."

The entire process was constructed by the Agent itself and consisted of four stages: foundational layer cycles including worldbuilding, characters, outline, tone, and more until scoring criteria were met; drafting chapter by chapter in the second stage, with chapters scoring below 6.0 being discarded for rewriting; conducting adversarial modifications and reader panel simulations in the third stage; and finally submitting to Claude Opus for iterative review in his dual roles as a "literary critic + novel professor" until no significant room for improvement remained. Quesnelle mentioned that this framework drew inspiration from Andrej Karpathy's Autoresearch "edit-assess-keep/discard" cycle, extended to novel creation, and directly tagged Karpathy in the tweet. Karpathy responded, "This is a great idea, although challenging to rigorously validate, as long as it is done with care, the effect should be good."

Nous Research is known for its open-source Hermes series models and has previously proposed the YaRN contextual expansion method.