Nous Research

entity
ai-researchopen-sourcefine-tuningagents

AI research organization focused on open-source model training, fine-tuning, and agent infrastructure. Based in the US.

Key projects

  • Hermes models — fine-tuned LLMs optimized for function calling and tool use (the “Hermes” family). Used as the base for tool-calling training and evaluation.
  • Hermes Agent — open-source, self-improving AI agent framework with multi-platform gateway, skills system, and RL training infrastructure.
  • Nous Portal — hosted inference API for Nous models and third-party models.
  • agentskills.io — open standard and hub for agent skills (procedural memory).
  • Atropos/Tinker — RL training framework for tool-calling models, integrated into Hermes Agent as tinker-atropos submodule.

Research contributions

  • Tool-call parser implementations for multiple model families (Hermes, DeepSeek, Qwen, Llama, Mistral, GLM, Kimi, Longcat)
  • Benchmark evaluation environments (TBLite, Terminal-Bench 2.0, YC-Bench)
  • Trajectory compression for synthetic training data generation
  • Collaboration with OpenThoughts, Collinear AI, Snorkel AI, Bespoke Labs on benchmark datasets