Hermes (Nous Research)

Nous Research · September 2023

activeOpen Weightdecoder onlytext

Why It Matters

Showed that community research labs could produce models rivaling corporate offerings, especially for creative and agentic tasks.

Description

A series of highly controllable fine-tuned models by Nous Research, designed to give users precise control over the AI's behavior and personality. Known for excelling at creative writing and roleplay tasks while maintaining strong general capabilities. Later versions added function calling (the ability to use external tools and APIs).

Key Innovations

Instruction Tuning
Instruction TuningFine-tuning a model on instruction-response pairs so it follows user commands more reliably.
Open Weight
Open WeightModel weights are publicly released but training data/code may not be. Enables fine-tuning but not full reproduction.

Family Tree

Built On

Lineage

LLaMALLaMA 2Hermes (Nous Research)

External Links