Hermes 3 70B Instruct is a 70-billion-parameter fine-tune of the Llama 3.1 70B foundation model, released by Nous Research as a generalist chat model with an emphasis on giving users strong steering control. The model is designed to feel less constrained than typical assistant-tuned LLMs, prioritizing alignment to the end user and exposing capabilities such as advanced agentic behavior, richer roleplay, deeper multi-turn conversation, and long-context coherence. Sources describe it as a "competitive, if not superior" fine-tune focused on powerful, reliable function calling, structured output, and improved code generation, making it a flexible base for both conversational interfaces and tool-driven workflows.

Building on the Hermes 2 lineage, Hermes 3 broadens the family with more capable agentic function calling, structured outputs, and better generalist assistant behavior across reasoning and coding tasks. Independent benchmark coverage places the model in the upper tier of evaluated open-weight systems, with standout performance on instruction following (IFEval 76.6%) and broad reasoning (BBH 53.8%), alongside competitive results on knowledge-heavy suites. Because the weights are openly published, practitioners can self-host the model or run it through third-party endpoints, which makes it a practical option for customized assistants, agent pipelines, and long-context applications where control over model behavior is a priority.