Three AI product moves
Nous Research published a demo showing better stability for its Hermes model on Xiaomi’s MiMo V2 Pro, Google unveiled a self‑coding, iterative AI called JITRO, and SoftBank with NEC announced a new domestic AI company in Japan — three separate product and corporate updates in the last 48 hours. The social posts and demos drew audience attention, with the Hermes demo seeing large view counts and JITRO and the SoftBank/NEC announcement also shared widely. (x.com) (x.com) (x.com)
Three separate artificial intelligence updates landed within two days: Nous Research showed a new Hermes demo on Xiaomi’s MiMo V2 Pro, Google surfaced a more autonomous coding agent under the Jules line, and SoftBank joined Japanese partners to form a domestic AI company. (github.com) (google.com) (jen.jiji.com) Nous Research’s April 8 release for Hermes Agent added “free Xiaomi MiMo v2 Pro” access on Nous Portal for auxiliary tasks including compression, vision, and summarization. Xiaomi says MiMo-V2-Pro launched March 18 and is built for “real-world agentic workloads,” with support for up to a 1 million-token context window. (github.com) (xiaomi.com) Xiaomi says MiMo-V2-Pro has more than 1 trillion total parameters with 42 billion active parameters, and says tool-call stability and accuracy were improved from earlier internal builds. Nous’s public demo focused on that reliability point, showing Hermes using the model in agent-style workflows rather than simple chat replies. (xiaomi.com) (github.com) A coding agent is software that reads a codebase, proposes changes, runs tests, and returns patches without waiting for a developer after every step. Google describes Jules that way on its public site, saying users can “delegate your backlog” and let the agent “proactively find and fix code improvements.” (google.com) (blog.google) Reports this week described Google’s next step as JITRO, an internal project tied to a more iterative, goal-driven version of Jules rather than a one-prompt tool. Google has not published a standalone JITRO product page, but its recent Jules materials already describe scheduled tasks and background agents that work asynchronously on repositories. (devops.com) (testingcatalog.com) (blog.google) In Japan, Jiji Press reported on April 12 that SoftBank, NEC, Sony Group, and Honda took the lead in setting up a new company to develop Japanese-made high-performance artificial intelligence. The report said each of the four companies took stakes of more than 10 percent and that other companies were negotiating minority investments. (jen.jiji.com) Jiji also reported that engineers from SoftBank and Preferred Networks are expected to join development, and that the company plans to apply for a national support program run by the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization. That program began accepting proposals in late March and is set to provide 1 trillion yen in assistance over five years from fiscal 2026. (jen.jiji.com) The three updates point to the same race from different angles: model providers are trying to make agents more dependable, platform companies are pushing coding agents toward longer-running tasks, and industrial groups are trying to secure local AI supply. By April 12, the public record was a Xiaomi-backed Hermes integration, Google’s live Jules site plus outside reporting on JITRO, and a new Japan AI venture led by SoftBank and NEC. (xiaomi.com) (google.com) (jen.jiji.com)
