Nous Research

Nous Research is an artificial intelligence research laboratory founded in 2023 and headquartered in New York City. Emerging from a collective of open-source software developers, the firm advances open-source AI development - building human-centric language models, AI agents, and research tools under an MIT License. Its stated position is that powerful AI should be in the hands of the many rather than the privileged few, and its technical work reflects that: model architecture, data synthesis, fine-tuning, reasoning, agent harnesses and learning loops, and decentralized and distributed training.

Among its notable outputs is Hermes Agent, an open-source agent harness and the world's most widely used of its kind. Hermes Agent is built around a learning loop that creates skills from experience, refines them in use, persists knowledge across sessions, and develops a deepening model of its users. Complementing it is the Psyche network architecture, which decentralizes AI training across underutilized hardware in order to widen access to the means of frontier development. Together with its language models and research tools, these efforts target the democratization of cutting-edge AI technology.

The laboratory has raised $90 million and sustains an active community of contributors and users across Discord, GitHub, and other platforms. Its engineering concerns span developer infrastructure and tools as well as core research, offering scope for work that is published openly and adopted at scale. For technical professionals, the distinguishing features are the combination of open-source release, applied research breadth, and the demonstrated adoption of its agent tooling.