Nous Research is a decentralized, 🏷️#open-source AI lab known for its Hermes family of open-weight language models and for training infrastructure that distributes model training across the internet rather than centralized data centers.
Nous began around 2022 as an internet-native collective on Discord and Twitter and was formalized as a lab in 2023, positioning itself as open-source-first and decentralization-focused. Its Hermes models are released as open weights through Hugging Face and serve as the foundation for 📝Hermes Agent, a long-lived autonomous agent framework with persistent memory and a self-improving skill loop.
On the infrastructure side, Nous developed DisTrO (Distributed Training Over the Internet) and the Psyche Network, a Solana-based system that pools globally idle GPUs to collaboratively train large models, coordinating and incentivizing contributors on-chain. In April 2025 the lab raised a $50 million round led by Paradigm at a $1 billion valuation.