Nous Research, the New York-based AI collective known for developing what it calls “personalized, unrestricted” language models, has launched a new Inference API that makes its models more accessible to developers and researchers through a programmatic interface.
The API launch represents a significant expansion of Nous Research’s offerings, which have gained attention for challenging the more restricted approaches of larger AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
“We heard your feedback, and built a simple system to make our language models more accessible to developers and researchers everywhere,” the company announced on social media today.
The initial API release features two of the company’s flagship models: Hermes 3 Llama 70B, a powerful general-purpose model based on Meta’s Llama 3.1 architecture, and DeepHermes-3 8B Preview, the company’s recently released reasoning model that allows users to toggle between standard responses and detailed chains of thought.
Today we’re releasing our Inference API that serves Nous Research models. We heard your feedback, and built a simple system to make our language models more accessible to developers and researchers everywhere.
The initial release features two models – Hermes 3 Llama 70B and… pic.twitter.com/dAEA8donln
— Nous Research (@NousResearch) March 12, 2025
Inside Nous Research’s waitlist-based portal: How the AI upstart is managing high demand
To manage demand, Nous has implemented a waitlist system through its new portal at portal.nousresearch.com, with access granted on a first-come, first-served basis. The company is providing all new accounts with $5.00 in free credits. Developers can access the API documentation to learn more about integration options.
The waitlist approach provides critical insight into Nous Research’s strategic positioning. Unlike major players with massive GPU reserves, Nous faces the infrastructure constraints common to smaller organizations in AI. The waitlist serves as both a technical necessity and a marketing tactic, creating an exclusivity that generates buzz while managing computational load.
What makes this approach particularly notable is how it reflects Nous’s grassroots ethos. While the company positions itself as an alternative to Big Tech AI, it’s also adopting pragmatic business strategies that acknowledge the realities of scaling inference services. This tension between idealism and practicality will likely define Nous’s journey as it transitions from purely open-source releases to commercial offerings.
The API follows OpenAI’s API design pattern for completions and chat completions, making it potentially easier for developers already familiar with that interface to integrate Nous models into their applications.
From GitHub downloads to cloud API: Nous Research’s evolution signals a new business model
This API launch comes just four months after Nous Research debuted Nous Chat in November, the company’s first user-facing chatbot interface. While the company has released numerous open-source models for local deployment, the new API allows developers to access high-performance versions of these models without managing their own infrastructure.
“Previously, if researchers and users wanted to actually deploy these models, they’d needed to download and run the code on their own machines—a time-consuming, finicky, and potentially costly endeavor,” noted VentureBeat executive editor Carl Franzen in his coverage of the Nous Chat launch.
DeepHermes-3, released just last month, represents the company’s entry into the increasingly competitive field of reasoning-focused AI models. The model allows users to switch between concise responses and detailed reasoning processes through a system prompt that activates its “thinking” capabilities.
The ‘unrestricted AI’ philosophy: How Nous Research challenges big tech’s guardrails
Since its founding in 2023, Nous Research has positioned itself as an alternative to more tightly controlled AI systems. The company emphasizes individual agency and alignment with user needs, reflected in blog posts with titles like “Freedom at the Frontier” and “From Black Box to Glass House: The Imperative For Transparent AI Development.“
“Superintelligence should solve for maximal individual agency and freedom of spirit. Its development cannot be left solely in the hands of a few corporations and oligarchs,” the company wrote in a recent blog post announcing its Psyche project on Solana.
This philosophical stance has resonated with developers seeking more flexible AI systems, though the approach has also raised questions about responsible deployment. Despite marketing itself as “unrestricted,” the company’s models do include some guardrails against harmful outputs.
Monetizing open AI research: Nous’s API strategy and roadmap for Hermes, DeepHermes, and beyond
The API launch signals Nous Research’s move toward a more sustainable business model while maintaining its commitment to open source principles. According to the company’s release timeline, Nous has released 29 AI artifacts since July 2023, including models, papers, code, and datasets.
The API represents a delicate but crucial evolution in Nous Research’s business model. By commercializing deployment while continuing to release model weights, Nous is attempting to square a difficult circle: generating revenue without alienating the open-source community that forms its foundation.
This hybrid approach appears designed to capture different segments of the market. Individual developers and researchers can still download and run models locally, while enterprises seeking reliability, convenience, and performance optimization can pay for API access. In effect, Nous is monetizing the infrastructure and optimization layer rather than the models themselves — a strategy that addresses the fundamental economic challenge of open-source AI without compromising its core principles.
The success of this approach may determine whether independent AI labs can establish sustainable business models that preserve their independence from big tech or venture capital firms that might push for more aggressive commercialization. For developers concerned about AI centralization, Nous’s experiment represents a potential middle path that could maintain diversity in the AI ecosystem.
Nous Research indicates that its inference offerings will expand over time, potentially including more of its models like Hermes 2 Pro, which specializes in function-calling, or its recently announced Psyche project.
For the growing ecosystem of AI startups building on open models, the new API provides another option beyond established players like Together AI, Anthropic, and OpenAI, potentially increasing competition and driving further innovation in the AI inference space.
“We welcome your ideas to help shape the future,” the company noted in its announcement, continuing its community-oriented approach to AI development.
The post Nous Research just launched an API that gives developers access to AI models that OpenAI and Anthropic won’t build appeared first on Venture Beat.
