Relatively unknown startup Nous Research has released Hermes 4, a new family of open-source models that rivals leading competitors in terms of performance while avoiding heavy-handed content filtering.

Hermes 4 enables users to choose between fast reasoning and more detailed, step-by-step reasoning, with the model’s entire thought process fully transparent.

In maths benchmarks, Hermes 4 405B delivered top-tier results: 96.3% on MATH-500 and 81.9% on AIME’24. Unlike Claude or ChatGPT, which often refuse to answer complex or sensitive queries, Hermes 4 responds two to three times more frequently. Developers can also configure their own censorship levels when deploying the model.

The full code is available here: https://huggingface.co/collections/NousResearch/hermes-4-collection-68a731bfd452e20816725728