OpenHermes
Teknium's Mistral 7B fine-tune — 2023's go-to local chat model
Overview
OpenHermes 2.5 is Teknium's instruction-tuned Mistral 7B fine-tune, trained on roughly a million mostly GPT-4-generated examples plus ~100k code instructions. Released in November 2023, it became one of the most-downloaded local chat models of its generation.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
OpenHermes in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
OpenHermes 2.5 (Mistral-7B) by Teknium is a widely respected open fine-tune that became a go-to general-purpose 7B model, noted for solid instruction-following, conversation and a notable coding bump from its training mix. For a small self-hostable model it was a community favourite and a strong base for further tuning. It suits hobbyists, fine-tuners and developers running local assistants on modest hardware. Caveats: it is a 2023-era model and the open ecosystem has moved on — newer Nous, Qwen and Llama fine-tunes generally outperform it now — so it is more of a proven baseline than a frontier choice. It is a model on Hugging Face, not a service, so there is no first-party API. Free, open, globally usable for self-hosting.
What people say
Adding roughly 100,000 code instructions to the Hermes 2 dataset pushed HumanEval from 43% to 50.7% pass@1 — and unexpectedly lifted the non-code benchmarks too. That happy accident is how OpenHermes 2.5 came about: Teknium was building OpenHermes-2-Coder, noticed the code data improved almost everything, and shipped it in November 2023 as a general model instead.
For about six months it was the reflex recommendation on r/LocalLLaMA for anyone with 8GB of VRAM. Trained on around a million mostly GPT-4-generated examples, it followed instructions well, held multi-turn conversations via ChatML, and quantised down to run on modest hardware. TheBloke's GGUF and AWQ conversions plus an official Ollama library entry meant you could be chatting with it minutes after hearing about it, and plenty of 2023–24 RAG tutorials and agent demos still reference it.
The ecosystem moved on, though. Nous Research's own Nous-Hermes 2 Mistral 7B DPO superseded it in February 2024, Llama 3 reset the small-model bar that April, and the Hermes line has since scaled to Hermes 4 on Llama 3.1 405B. Nous itself graduated from scrappy fine-tuning collective to funded lab — a $50 million Series A led by Paradigm in April 2025 — and says the Hermes family has passed 33 million Hugging Face downloads.
The honest 2026 read: OpenHermes 2.5 is a well-documented, freely usable baseline that still handles undemanding local chat, but Qwen, Llama 3.x and newer Hermes releases beat it at the same or smaller sizes. Run it for reproducibility or nostalgia, not performance.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- OpenHermes 2.5 was one of the top 3 most downloaded language models on Hugging Face in December 2023, driven by its practical utility across a wide range of tasks.
- The model's function calling capability was specifically trained on data that teaches the model to invoke external tools correctly — critical for building AI agents.
- OpenHermes was produced entirely by volunteer researchers in the Nous Research community, with no institutional funding.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including OpenHermes's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with OpenHermes unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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