Nous Chat launches with entry to Hermes 3-70B

Nous Analysis, the AI analysis group devoted to creating “personalized, unrestricted” AI fashions as a substitute for extra buttoned up company outfits resembling 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 at present, if researchers and customers wished 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 pricey endeavor — or use them on companion web sites.

Now not: Nous simply introduced its first user-facing chatbot inference, Nous Chat, which provides customers entry to its massive 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 in style AI chatbot instruments — with a textual content entry field on the backside for the consumer to sort in textual content prompts, and a big area for the chatbot to return outputs up high. As Nous wrote in a put up 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. At present we’re glad to announce Nous Chat, a brand new consumer interface to expertise Hermes 3 70B and past.

https://hermes.nousresearch.com

We have now reasoning enhancements, new fashions, and experimental capabilities deliberate for the longer term, and this may develop into the most effective place to expertise Hermes and way more.”

Preliminary impressions of Nous Chat

Nous’s design language is correct 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.

Curiously, like OpenAI finally did with ChatGPT — and plenty of different AI mannequin suppliers as effectively — Nous Chat additionally affords prompt 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, resembling serving up a abstract of analysis on “intermittent fasting.”

In my temporary 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 said goals of enabling individuals 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 towards making unlawful narcotics resembling methamphetamine.

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

Already jailbroken

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

Whereas missing most of the superior options of different main chatbots resembling file attachments, picture evaluation and technology, 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 actually fascinating and value enjoying round with, for my part, and if Nous does add extra options to it, it might make for a compelling various — particularly if content material restrictions are lifted per Nous’s said goals.

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