Published: 2026-10-10
Summary

Hermes Agent and StepFun's Step 5 Preview: what is claimed, what is listed, and what we could not confirm

Chapters / key moments (click to jump — plays here on the page)

A brief on a model release: StepFun's Step 5 Preview, shown as the model inside Hermes Agent. The video says it is free to use on Nous Portal for about a week, fast, and good enough for agent work that doesn't need a frontier model. Most of the video is a tour of the creator's own agent dashboard and a community pitch. We kept the model facts and checked what we could.

Source video

"Hermes Agent + Step 5 is INSANE (FREE!)" by Julian Goldie SEO — Watch on YouTube →

What the video says

Using it: pick Step 5 Preview from the model list in Hermes and chat as normal. He says it is "free to use" as a cloud model through Nous Portal, "for 1 week", with open weights to follow.
The model: from StepFun, described as its flagship: a sparse mixture of experts, roughly 600 billion parameters with 27 billion active, with a 1M-token context window. He rates it as lightweight and fast, "not frontier level", on par with Gemini 3.5 Flash and cheaper.
His view of where to use it: agentic and content tasks that don't need a frontier model (SEO content, research, scheduled workflows), and to switch to Claude Code or Codex for hard coding.
Web search: he says Hermes Cloud's web search now uses Perplexity's model, so no separate Firecrawl-style key is needed. We haven't verified this against the Hermes documentation; check it for your install.

What we could and couldn't confirm

1M-token context: a third-party aggregator listing for Step 5 Preview (ZenMux) shows a 1M-token context window and a publish date of September 20, 2026.
Price: the same listing shows paid per-token pricing, $1.05 per million input and $3 per million output tokens, and doesn't say it is free anywhere. We couldn't find a Nous Portal or Hermes announcement of a free Step 5 Preview period, so treat "free for a week" as the presenter's claim that may be time-limited or already over. Check the Nous Portal model list.
Parameter counts: not stated on that listing; the 600B total and 27B active figures are the video's only.

Gotchas & Caveats

"Preview" models change or disappear, and free promotions end without notice. Don't build a routine that depends on a free tier.
A fast, non-frontier model can be wrong on agent tasks that need careful tool use. Test it on a small routine before moving real workflows, and keep a frontier model for coding.
The creator's dashboard, the voice agent and the memory setup shown are his own "operating system", sold through his community; they're not Hermes features.

Key Takeaways

Step 5 Preview is available to try as a Hermes model; verify the free window and price on Nous Portal before relying on it.
It is positioned as a fast, cheap model with a 1M-token context for agent workloads, not a frontier coding model.