Ryan 'Teknium' is Co-Founder and Head of Post-Training at Nous Research, a decentralized open-source AI lab, and is widely regarded as the company's most recognized public figure and the progenitor of the Hermes series of language models.

Teknium co-created the Nous Research collective in 2022 as a community-driven AI research group on Discord, before previously working as an LLM Data Engineer at Stability AI and on character LLMs at Digi AI.

A self-taught Python programmer and AI engineer, Teknium has been cited in at least 14 research papers and is a leading voice in the open-source AI movement, championing decentralized and unbiased model development.

As Head of Post-Training, Teknium leads fine-tuning research, dataset curation, RL environments, and evals, and has built and stewarded the Hermes model family from OpenHermes through Hermes 4 with hybrid reasoning capabilities.

The Nous Hermes Agent has been cloned over 24 million times and drives roughly 2.5% of global AI token usage, with Nous Research reaching a $1.5 billion valuation following its $90 million Series B round backed by Nvidia, Microsoft M12, and Samsung.