u/Alan_Silva_TI

A lot of people are getting into Hermes Agent lately, and thankfully the community around it is way more grounded than the crustacean one, where everyone and their mother tells newcomers to just use the latest version of Claude and spend hundreds of dollars a day doing simple stuff like web searches.

I wanted to share that there’s a new FREE model on OpenRouter that is an absolute BEAST. It’s easily the best model I’ve ever used outside of the ultra-expensive SOTA models.

It’s called Ring 2.6, and it’s currently free on OpenRouter:

https://openrouter.ai/inclusionai/ring-2.6-1t:free

The tool-calling and troubleshooting capabilities of this model are absolutely insane.

I’ve been using it A LOT, and my Hermes experience has been an absolute blast.

I usually rely almost exclusively on local/free OpenRouter models (or very cheap ones) for my Hermes setup, and honestly, it works fine like 95% of the time. But that remaining 5% can be REALLY annoying when things break or the model gets stuck.

Normally, I only use SOTA models to fix something extremely complex or when I absolutely need to get something right on the first try.

But this model? XD This thing THINKS A LOT, so it burns through tokens (I started using it yesterday) like crazy. As you can see in the screenshot, I honestly don’t know if its pricing will still be viable once it officially launches.

But man... I really hope it is, because I’m in love with this thing.

"Hardware is the only moat".

I read that quote yesterday, and at first, I thought it was just another person trying to sound smart on Twitter. But after the latest Anthropic + xAI developments, I’m starting to believe it.

Open source will probably win in the long run, and even xAI seems to have realized that. Based on what we’ve seen over the last couple of months from leading AI researchers, LLMs alone don’t seem capable of reaching AGI. Because of that, most frontier labs now appear to be focusing more on building products around their models and staying competitive rather than pursuing AGI directly.

If LLMs really do have a theoretical ceiling, then it’s only a matter of time before open source catches up completely.

What we do know is that inference is going to become even more competitive in the near future. Companies will likely start buying even more hardware and compute resources at massive scale to guarantee good performance for increasingly large models.

There’s also the trend of consumer hardware becoming even more expensive, since manufacturers are now prioritizing data center demand over consumer GPUs, creating shortages for regular users.

We’re already seeing how happy people who bought stacks of 3090s with NVLink support are right now.

So, what do you guys think?

Should we wait, or should we upgrade ASAP?

This is the BEST FREE MODEL for Hermes - ATM