Nous Chat launches with entry to Hermes 3-70B

Nous Analysis, the AI analysis group devoted to creating “personalized, unrestricted” AI fashions as an alternative choice to extra buttoned up company outfits corresponding to OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and others, has beforehand launched a number of open supply fashions in its Hermes household, and new, extra environment friendly AI coaching strategies.

However earlier than right now, if researchers and customers needed to really deploy these fashions, they’d wanted to obtain and run the code on their very own machines — a time-consuming, finicky, and potential expensive endeavor — or use them on companion web sites.

Not: Nous simply introduced its first user-facing chatbot inference, Nous Chat, which provides customers entry to its giant language mannequin (LLM) Hermes 3-70B, a fine-tuned variant of Meta’s Llama 3.1, within the acquainted format of ChatGPT, Hugging Chat, and different standard AI chatbot instruments — with a textual content entry field on the backside for the consumer to sort in textual content prompts, and a big house for the chatbot to return outputs up high. As Nous wrote in a publish on the social community X:

“Since our first model of Hermes was launched over a yr in the past, many individuals have requested for a spot to expertise it. As we speak we’re comfortable to announce Nous Chat, a brand new consumer interface to expertise Hermes 3 70B and past.

https://hermes.nousresearch.com

Now we have reasoning enhancements, new fashions, and experimental capabilities deliberate for the long run, and this can grow to be the most effective place to expertise Hermes and way more.”

Preliminary impressions of Nous Chat

Nous’s design language is true up my alley, utilizing classic fonts and characters evoking early PC terminals. It affords a darkish and light-weight mode the consumer can toggle between within the higher proper hand nook.

Apparently, like OpenAI finally did with ChatGPT — and plenty of different AI mannequin suppliers as effectively — Nous Chat additionally affords steered or instance prompts on the backside of the display above the immediate entry textbox, together with “Knowledge & Analysis,” “Creative Writing,” “Problem Solving,” and “Research & Synthesis.”

Clicking any of those will ship a pre-written immediate to the underlying mannequin by the chatbot, and have it reply, corresponding to serving up a abstract of analysis on “intermittent fasting.”

In my transient assessments of the chatbot, it was speedy, serving up solutions in single-digit seconds, and was in a position to produce hyperlinks again to URLs on the internet for sources it cited, although it appeared to hallucinate these as effectively, every so often — and the chatbot itself claimed it couldn’t entry the net.

Regardless of its beforehand acknowledged goals of enabling folks to deploy and management their very own AI fashions with out content material restrictions, Nous Chat itself truly does seem to have some guardrails set, together with in opposition to making unlawful narcotics corresponding to methamphetamine.

As well as, the underlying Hermes 3-70B mannequin specified to me that its data cutoff date was April 2023, making it much less helpful to acquire present occasions, one thing that OpenAI is now competing straight on in opposition to Google and different startups corresponding to Perplexity.

Already jailbroken

That hasn’t stopped notorious AI jailbreakers corresponding to Pliny the Prompter (@elder_plinius on X) from already shortly cracking the chatbot and getting previous the restrictions.

Whereas missing lots of the superior options of different main chatbots corresponding to file attachments, picture evaluation and era, and interactive code show canvases or trays, Nous Chat is unlikely to interchange these rivals for a lot of enterprise customers.

However as an experiment it’s definitely attention-grabbing and value taking part in round with, for my part, and if Nous does add extra options to it, it might make for a compelling different — particularly if content material restrictions are lifted per Nous’s acknowledged goals.

I’ve reached out to the group for extra data on Nous Chat and its method to guardrails/content material restrictions, and I’ll replace once I hear again.