Hermes 3 70B

Hermes 3 70B

Quick answer: Hermes 3 70B is NousResearch's August 2024 instruction fine-tune of Meta's Llama 3.1 70B. It scores 47.2% on MMLU-Pro. Under the Llama 3.1 License with open weights on Hugging Face, it is designed for strong general reasoning, long-context tasks, and agentic deployment patterns.

At a Glance

Where Hermes 3 70B leads

• NousResearch instruction-tuning — improved function calling and tool use over base Llama 3.1 70B
• 128K context window — full Llama 3.1 70B context
• Open weights — self-hostable for agentic pipelines
• Strong at complex system prompts and multi-turn conversation
• Agent-optimised: designed explicitly for agentic and tool-using deployment

Where it lags

• 47.2% MMLU-Pro — below leading 2025 open-weight models (Qwen3 32B, Llama 4 Maverick)
• Base Llama 3.1 70B from August 2024 — older than Llama 4, Qwen3, Phi-4
• Knowledge cutoff March 2024 — outdated
• No reasoning/thinking mode

Best for: Agentic and tool-use pipelines requiring open-weight models; teams specifically using NousResearch's Hermes instruction style; legacy Hermes-based deployments.

What Hermes 3 70B Is

Hermes 3 70B is NousResearch's third generation Hermes fine-tune, built on Meta's Llama 3.1 70B base. Released August 12, 2024, it specialises in advanced instruction following, function calling, and agentic capability — areas where the base Llama 3.1 70B was strong but could be improved through targeted fine-tuning.

The Hermes series is known in the open-source community for producing models with reliable tool use, structured output generation, and consistent behaviour with complex system prompts. Hermes 3 70B brings these properties to the Llama 3.1 70B scale.

Its 47.2% MMLU-Pro score reflects its 2024 vintage and 70B base — newer open-weight models like Llama 4 Maverick (80.5%), Qwen3 32B (no MMLU-Pro score but strong AetherCode), and Phi-4 (70.4% at only 14B) have since surpassed it on academic knowledge benchmarks. Hermes 3 70B remains relevant for use cases that specifically benefit from NousResearch's instruction-tuning approach and are already integrated with Hermes-style prompting.

Specifications

Pricing

Hermes 3 70B is available as open weights under the Llama 3.1 License — free to self-host. Available via third-party providers (Together AI, Replicate, etc.) at market rates.

Context Window

Hermes 3 70B has a 128,000-token context window — the full Llama 3.1 70B context, suitable for long document analysis and multi-turn agentic tasks.

Public Benchmark Scores

Hermes 3 70B vs Alternatives

For new deployments requiring open-weight general capability, Llama 4 Maverick, Qwen3 32B, or Phi-4 provide significantly better benchmark performance. Hermes 3 70B is most relevant when the specific Hermes instruction-tuning style or existing Hermes-based production integrations are the primary consideration.

Related Models & Benchmarks

• Compare: Llama 4 Maverick · Phi-4 · Qwen3 32B
• Benchmarks: MMLU-Pro

Frequently Asked Questions

Specs from NousResearch's official Hermes 3 release (August 2024) and Benchgen evaluations. Last updated 2026-07-24.