Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B

Open MoE Chat Model from Nous Research

What is Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B?

Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B is an advanced open-weight Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) chat model developed by Nous Research, built on top of Mixtral-8x7B by Mistral. It is fine-tuned using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to maximize instruction-following performance, safety, and alignment in conversations.

With only 2 active experts per forward pass, this model achieves high performance at a fraction of the compute, offering GPT-3.5-class quality while remaining lightweight and fast.

Key Features of Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B

Mixture of Experts Architecture

Mixtral-8x7B uses 8 experts, activating 2 per token—balancing quality and efficiency.

DPO Fine-Tuning for Alignment

Trained on curated high-quality instructions and preferences for helpful, safe outputs.

ChatML Format Support

Enables system and user prompts for more structured, controllable chat sessions.

Extremely Fast Inference

Ideal for real-time deployment in chatbots, assistants, and task automation tools.

Open-Source, Commercial-Friendly License

No restrictions on deployment, modification, or redistribution.

Flexible Fine-Tuning

Easily extend to specialized domains like healthcare, education, law, or customer service.

Use Cases of Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B

Deploy fast, helpful virtual agents in internal tools, customer portals, or support flows.

Power AI workflows that require fast response and task coordination with low latency.

Build ethically safe, user-aligned bots for regulated industries or educational use.

Run efficient AI agents locally or on low-resource infrastructure.

Analyze model safety, alignment behavior, or customize model for academic research.

Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B

vs

Other Open Models

Feature	Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral	Mixtral-8x7B	GPT-3.5 Turbo	Mistral-7B Instruct
Architecture	MoE (2 of 8 experts)	MoE (Base)	Dense Proprietary	Dense Transformer
Parameters (active)	~12.9B per token	~12.9B	~175B	7B
DPO Fine-Tuning	✅	❌	✅	❌
Chat Format	✅ ChatML	❌	✅	❌
Open Weights	✅	✅	❌	✅
Inference Speed	⚡ Fast	⚡ Fast	⚠️ Slower	Fast