ThursdAI - May 14 - TML Interaction Models, Musk v Altman Disclosures, CW Sandboxes & /goal Takes Over

Hey everyone, Alex here 👋I am back live on ThursdAI after a week off, and yes, I am now a married man! Thank you for all the congrats, and also thank you to Ryan and Yam for holding down the fort last week while I tried very hard to disconnect.This week was a relatively chill one in AI land (no, really, for once), which actually let us go deep on some really fascinating stuff. We’ve got Thinking Machines Lab finally shipping their first real research with these wild interaction models, Meta Muse Spark showing up in actual products (and it’s surprisingly good!), the Musk v. Altman trial dropping juicy disclosures, and probably the biggest narrative shift on the show today: all of us are quitting OpenClaw. Yeah, you read that right. We’ll get into why.Also! and this is breaking news from this morning, CoreWeave just launched Sandboxes for your agents. I’ll cover that in This Week’s Buzz, but if you’ve been waiting for production-grade sandbox infrastructure that powers 9 out of 10 major AI labs, today’s your day.Oh, and we had Vic Perez from Krea on to talk about Krea 2, their first foundation image model trained completely from scratch. Let’s dig in.ThursdAI - Highest signal weekly AI news show is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The Great OpenClaw Exodus towards Hermes 🫠I’m going to start with what was honestly the most emotional thread of the entire show, because three of us, me, Ryan, AND Wolfram; all independently switched away from OpenClaw this week. And we kicked off the show literally processing this together on air.The story is the same across all of us. OpenClaw was magical back in February when we first brought it to you. Things just worked. But after Anthropic’s pricing changes (we covered this — they made Max-tier subscription usage of Opus through OpenClaw significantly more expensive), and after months of the constant Lego-construction-style breakage on every update, the magic faded. Ryan said it best on the show; he was “constantly fixing OpenClaw” instead of using it.So Ryan went to Codex. Wolfram and I both went to Hermes from Nous Research. And folks, things just work again. That February feeling is back, and with GPT 5.5, it’s an incredible assistant!Why Hermes? A few things:* It’s now the #1 most-used CLI agent on OpenRouter globally, passing OpenClaw and even passing Claude Code on OpenRouter usage. That’s a massive milestone for Nous Research and shows we’re not alone in this migration.* It has /goal (more on this in a sec), steering, and background computer use via the TryCUA integration.* It’s open! which means if you’ve built a system like Wolfram’s “Amy” or my “Wooolfred” or Ryan’s “R2” (yes, we know each other’s assistants’ names better than each other’s kids’ names at this point 😅), you can port your memories, profile, and soul files seamlessly.The migration was so smooth that Wolfram literally had Codex talk to Hermes to plan and execute the migration of his home assistant agent. Two agents collaborating to migrate themselves. We are living in 2026 and it’s easier than ever to switch. If you haven’t tried Hermes, give it a go! Steering is maybe the most underrated addition to Hermes, it’s a Codex feature, but exists in Hermes, with GPT 5.5 you can send a follow-up message, and the agent will see it after the next tool call, not after the whole chain of thought was completed (like OpenClaw defaults to) - this changes the conversation to be much more natural! Agents buying wedding gifts using Stripe wallet! Real quick story: Two weeks ago we covered Stripe’s new wallet APIs that let your agents have actual budgets to spend money on the web. I told my agent (back when it was still OpenClaw) to “go buy us a wedding present, don’t tell me what it is.” It half-worked, half-broke. This week, a giant custom map of our travels that just arrived in the mail. I approved one Stripe push notification and the rest just happened. It’s been paying my traffic tickets via screenshots. I’ve also had Hermes pay traffic tickets for me (HOV lane ones, not like.. DUI, 80% of my drive is Tesla F