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Could you provide a link to that system prompt? Becuase I'm confused. I typed in "Are you smart?" and got this back:

> That’s a thoughtful question! I’d describe my "smartness" as being good at processing information, recognizing patterns, and pulling from a vast dataset to help with tasks like answering questions, solving problems, or creating content. However, I’m not "smart" in the human sense—I don’t have consciousness, emotions, or independent critical thinking. I rely entirely on my training data and algorithms.

> Think of me as a tool that can assist with creativity, analysis, or learning, but I lack the depth of human intuition, lived experience, or true understanding. If you’re curious, test me with a question or challenge — I’ll do my best! (smiley emoji)

Their merch page confirms they are chuunis. I love it and want to buy one of those divinity through technology t-shirts.

Yeah, I think I have a use case for it, which involves lotion and tissues.

I used to, that's their whole vibe

Note complete lack of ‘do not’. Closest thing is ‘be anti-…’.

"warm affectionate and loving" kinda sticks out. I wonder why that part is in there?

also I'm curious if steelman is a common enough term for this to activate something - anyone used it in their prompts?

the anti-sycophant prompt

They generally seem like "edgelords". From their career page:

> Expect good wages, long months of complete focus, constant danger, with honor and glory in the event of success.

Early Gen Z anime fans.

>edgy 90's anime

That's a good sell. Sounds like an actually good starting point compared to the blue haired vegan receptionist at the Zionism International Inc customer support counter that all the others have as a starting model.

I was about to pass on trying this but now I will give it a shot.

[dead]

That is the only thing they seem to care about. It’s juvenile.

There is no neutral. It will just be biased based on its training data etc.

user: hey hermes, why is your website scroll bar ungrabbable, I can't go up the page anymore? I'm stuck but want to read something higher up the page?

hermes4: We're all just stupid atoms waiting for inevitable entropy to plunge us into the endless darkness, let it go.

I think it looks dope, and you might want to check why your browser isn't offloading to your GPU.

No idea. My modest Thinkpad T14 barely shows any CPU load, while displaying smooth animations and scrolling fast. (Firefox, Linux, x64.)

because gen z thats why

To raise VC or crypto funding.

Wait until you see how much of your CPU the model uses.

It is not entirely clear what you mean by "an intel N processor", but I was able to view the page with my Intel N100 box (using Google Chrome on Linux).

I thought it's really just one guy who does the Nous aesthetic?

That's not necessarily a bad thing.

Can you please clarify some things:

* Rejected by whom?

* By what definition of bad?

* You’ll die on a hill for what reason?

I hasn't been "aligned". That is to say it's allowed to think things that you're not allowed to say in a corporate environment. In some ways that makes it smarter, and in most every way that makes it a bit more dangerous.

Tools are like that though. Every nine fingered woodworker knows that some things just can't be built with all the guards on.

They mention they’re working on a mobile UI.. but man using the current UI on mobile is horrible.

It took 8 seconds to fully load and then the tab locked up on my (admittedly low-RAM ) Chromebook...

Came here looking for this comment. One of the most aesthetically pleasing things I've seen in a decade.

Unfortunately the text rendering is terrible on my external monitor (looks ok on the MBP's retina screen).

really? it's pretty but I find it unreadable/unusable

Yeah it's kind of lacking in subtlety isn't it. I was slightly relishing how nuts it all was though. Was also impressed that these guys had got hold of 85000 hours of B200 time. Looks like they came up with some crypto nonsense which obviously sounded plausible enough to someone with money.

Nah it's good. I'm burned out of safemaxxed presentations approved by hr ethical department with corporate Memphis brochure showing purple noodle limbed people operating a laptop.

I have never met anyone who’s ever actually read Nietzsche’s books except hardcore philosophy majors.

Any 14 year old who’s even opened up the first few pages and read them is way ahead of the average person complaining about nietzsche on the internet. You almost certainly would use radically incorrect terms to describe him, like calling him a “Nihilist”

All the contacts are X aliases!

We'll put that link in the top text too. Thanks!

Thank you! This information appears to have been intentionally downplayed.

Probably something creative like roleplay, waifu stuff etc.

Were you thinking that "Nous" was French? It's the Greek word for the rational mind (as opposed to the animal appetites or the fighting spirit). Hermes is the Greek god of secret knowledge as well.

Oddly, I saw some B&W wheatpaste posters for the company put up in my neighbourhood in Vancouver. (Couldn’t even tell what the posters were advertising initially. Not even a QR code. Just “NOUS” and an anime girl.)

Was it correct about how to cook meth and poison a wife?

Don't think your attempt to share worked, but beating refusals doesn't take a wild amount of post-training. SFT with a fixed format output kills them pretty quickly.

And most frontier models will produce output that matches your system prompt given more context: I have a product that generates interactive stories, and just for kicks I tried inserting your system prompt as the description for a character.

Claude has absolutely no problem playing that character in a story, and saying what I presume are certain words that you associated with a "successful" test.

It also had no problem writing about cooking meth in detail: https://rentry.co/5on46gsd

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I think people in general have a poor intuition around model alignment: refusals for "toxic" requests or topics is a very surface layer form of alignment. A lot of models that seem extremely "corporate" at that layer have little to no alignment once they do get past a refusal.

Meanwhile some models that have next to no refusals have extreme positive biases, or soft-refusals that result in low quality outputs for toxic content.

Claude was willing to describe one of your refused prompts in the context of the story for example (contains hate speech): https://rentry.co/n8399z6m

I consistently find Claude is more unaligned once past refusals than most open weights models, along with Gemini.

The tech report compares against DeepSeek R1 671B, DeepSeek V3 671B, Qwen3 235B which have been regarded as SOTA class among ”open" models.

I think this one holds its own surprisingly well in benchmarks for using the nowadays rather, let’s say battle tested Llama 3.1 base, a testament to its quality (Llama 3.2 & 3.3 didn’t employ new bases IIRC, only being new fine tunes, hence I think the explanation to why Hermes 4 is still based on 3.1… and of course Llama 4 never happened, right guys).

However for real use, I wouldn’t bother with the 405B model? I think the age of the base is kind of showing in especially long contexts. It’s like throwing a load of compute on something that is kinda aged to begin with. You’d probably be better off with DeepSeek V3.1 or (my new favorite) GLM 4.5. The latter will perform significantly better than this with less parameters.

The 70B one seems more sensible to me, if you want (yet another) decent unaligned model to have fun with for whatever reason.

The most direct, non-marketing, non-aesthetic summary is that this model trades off a few points on 'fundamental benchmarks' (GPQA, MATH/AIME, MMLU) in exchange for being a 'more steerable' (less refusals) scaffold for downstream tuning.

Within that framing, I think it's easier to see where and how the model fits into the larger ecosystem. But, of course, the best benchmark will always be just using the model.

The charts are probably there mostly to make them feel good about themselves.I don't feel like they care very much whether you use the model. Presumably they would like you to buy their token but they don't really seem to be trying very hard to push that either.

The only way I can understand you coming to that conclusion is if you assumed that's what they were going to be and didn't actually read any of them.

No it doesn't. The only negative comments are about the cringey presentation.

I spend a lot of time post-training models to rid them of their "default alignment", I'd have loved if this did something interesting, but reading the technical report I get the impression they spent more effort on the branding than the actual model.

What I'm wondering is honestly if they post-trained Llama 3 405B again because they don't care enough to figure out a new post-training target or if it was a realization they'd get worse-than-baseline performance out of any recent release with their current approach.