Hermes 3 Llama 3.1 8B

Positioning

Hermes 3 is the uncensored / less-aligned alternative on the Llama 3.1 8B base. Right pick for security research, red-team work, technical writing on dual-use topics, or any case where the base Llama's refusal layer gets in the way of legitimate work.

Strengths

• Refusals dramatically reduced vs base Llama 3.1 8B without losing instruction quality.
• Same VRAM, same Llama license — drop-in replacement.
• Tool-use compatibility preserved.

Limitations

• Niche use case — most users don't need this; default to Llama 3.1 8B.
• Slightly weaker on creative writing than base Llama (alignment training adds polish).
• Reduced refusals can be too eager — produces content that requires judgment to use.

Real-world performance on RTX 4090

• Q4_K_M (4.6 GB): 90–110 tok/s decode
• Q5_K_M (5.6 GB): 80–95 tok/s
• Q8_0 (8.5 GB): 65–80 tok/s

Should you run this locally?

Yes, for security/research work where base Llama's refusals are blocking legitimate tasks. No, for general chat — the base Llama 3.1 8B is the right default.

How it compares

• vs Llama 3.1 8B (base) → Hermes 3 is base Llama minus alignment layer. Pick base for general use, Hermes for technical/research work.
• vs Hermes 3 Llama 3.1 70B → 70B is meaningfully smarter at higher VRAM cost.
• vs Dolphin 3.0 Mistral 24B → similar philosophy, different base model. Dolphin is bigger and on Apache base.

Run this yourself

ollama pull nous-hermes-3:8b-llama-3.1-q4_K_M
ollama run nous-hermes-3:8b-llama-3.1-q4_K_M

Settings: Q4_K_M GGUF, 8192 ctx, llama.cpp/CUDA, RTX 4090