Organisation
Nous Research
An open-weight model group known for its Hermes fine-tunes and for decentralised-training work such as the Psyche network.
Nous Research is a group known for open-weight fine-tunes of other labs' models, most visibly its Hermes series built on Meta's Llama. It positions itself around what it calls "individual alignment" — steering a model to follow a user's own instructions and persona closely rather than the safety-tuned defaults of closed assistants — which has made it popular with developers building agents and character-driven applications. It has also pushed into decentralised training: its Psyche project, announced in 2025, aims to train large models across scattered, otherwise-idle GPUs coordinated over the public internet rather than inside a single company's data centre. That work reflects a broader argument it makes about who can afford to train frontier models at all.
- Category
- Open source & ecosystem
- Founded
- 2023
- HQ
- New York, US
- Funding
- ~$1bn valuation (2025 Series A led by Paradigm); reported in mid-2026 to be raising more at ~$1.5bn
- Key people
- Karan Malhotra, Jeffrey Quesnelle
Appears alongside
Featured in threads
Tracks
- Open weights & ecosystem 4
- Models & capabilities 3
- Compute & infrastructure 2
Nous Research releases Hermes 4.3, trained on Psyche network
Nous Research released Hermes 4.3, the first flagship Hermes model trained using its decentralised Psyche network rather than a centralised GPU cluster.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities · Compute & infrastructure
Nous Research releases Hermes 4
Built by post-training Llama 3.1 checkpoints alone, the 405B model scored 57.1% on RefusalBench against 17.67% for GPT-4o, reflecting Nous's low-refusal alignment approach.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities
Nous Research announces Psyche decentralised training network
Psyche coordinates training across idle GPUs using Solana for state management; Nous said its first run would train a 40-billion-parameter model on 20 trillion tokens.
Open weights & ecosystem · Compute & infrastructure
Nous Research releases Hermes 3
Fine-tuned from Llama 3.1 at 8B, 70B and 405B parameters, with synthetic training data emphasising instruction-following, roleplay and function-calling for agents.
Open weights & ecosystem · Models & capabilities