# How I Got My Friend to Like AI

> It was kind of by my accident.

My friend who is non-technical dislikes AI.  He has a mandate from his job to use it, but is only given access to CoPilot through Office 365.  I can't speak to the quality of what they offer, I haven't used it, but he doesn't like it.  But with search engines being less and less useful, I know it's difficult for him to find what he's looking for.  So I decided to setup Hermes.  My thought was if I can I do the searches with him, I can help him learn how to use AI properly and eventually encourage him to pay for something like Claude.

I started off simple.  Setup Hermes and connect Telegram.  I should have expected he would turn the bot against me...  He told it to ignore me and it did!  But the pranks aside, I started asking it for information about sports and movies and all sorts of things.  It was wrong a lot, so I updated the base instructions to fact check and setup Exa, for searching.  After using it for a bit, I asked if it's been useful and he said yes!

Next step was to try and replicate some of what Claude can do when you ask it to research.  Hermes has the ability to academic and drug research, but that wasn't too interesting, so I went with their OSINT plugin.  I changed Telegram to use topics, so each one can be bound to a tool and showed him.  He was confused of course, not knowing what OSINT is.  But it served as a good test to show him what AI can do beyond trolling and using it as a search engine.  I put my own name in and... it found a lot!  He was really impressed!  It was a good way to show how useful AI can be.

That doesn't solve the general research requirement, so I had to [make my own plugin, that exposes a research skill](https://github.com/Doelfke/hermes-research-plugin).  Just something I threw together quickly, but the idea is: find multiple sources of information about the topic, aggregate them, and make recommendations.  It's running on the same model I have loaded to code and run the bot, so it is a bit slow, since the work it can't be fanned out to auxiliary models, but hey, it's free.  I asked it find me a car based on my budget and other parameters to show him how it can be used.  I suspect I will end up iterating on it a bit, but it's pretty impressive for a few minutes of work!  He said it also seems useful and that he likes it so far!

I think most tools like OpenClaw and Hermes are really oriented towards Mac users.  Macs aren't as strong on the inference side of things, but you can easily run multiple models and have large contexts, based on your RAM, since it's shared with the GPU.  That being said, I face different challenges than others when running AI locally.  If I were to run this on a dedicated Mac Studio or something, I'd likely choose different models and run auxiliary models side-by-side, since there is plenty of VRAM for it.  With my setup, I can use it to code and chat at the same time, as long as I'm okay with the slow downs (which I am).  

In closing, I didn't think it'd end up going this far.  I wanted to show my friend how to use AI in a world where search engines have become far less effective.  I ended up creating a system where he (or we) can search, research, and even troll a bit.  He doesn't fully realize it yet, but it will change how he uses the web and finds information -- that's a big win in my book.  It should be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Read online: https://davidoelfke.dev/blog/how-i-got-my-friend-to-like-ai-94llTi1V0FKXjlfeQJvkQ