ANNOUNCING NOUS PSYCHE ON SOLANA
Psyche is the turn of the tide in the battle for freedom in AI. The development of superintelligence cannot be left solely in the hands of a few corporations and powerful individuals. Psyche is (humanity’s) imperative – a training network to democratize and decentralize the development of superintelligence.
The first phase of Psyche builds upon the Nous DisTrO innovation, which unlocks the training of models over-the-internet using heterogeneous GPUs. The Solana blockchain coordinates the high-level steps in the training process, allowing the model training to be fault-tolerant, censorship-resistant, and globally distributed. Initially, compute will be whitelisted, with plans to move to a permissionless network over time.
The second phase of Psyche expands its impact: accessible inference and advanced model capabilities. State-of-the-art (SOTA) models will inevitably come out of left field—techniques like advanced reasoning and reinforcement learning (RL) will power vision, computer use, and agentic tasks. Psyche will be the birthplace of these SOTA models, while Nous fine-tunes and serves them. Psyche unlocks a system for continuous model improvement, and enables instant distribution of Nous products. Learn more about Psyche by exploring the code and the documentation.
NOUS DISTRO is an optimizer and networking stack that constitutes the core component of the Psyche Network. DisTrO lets each node train independently instead of coordinating at every step, decreasing bandwidth requirements by a factor of 1,000 — 10,000x, and achieving comparable results to centralized training.
Underutilized heterogeneous compute exists in data centers globally. This asset class of idle compute grows daily, as newer hardware is commissioned by hyper scalers in an ASI arms race. Psyche joins this compute together for a common purpose, pushing back against the notion that the oligopoly is the only player in the quest for intelligence. With Psyche, global power and compute becomes concentrated in the hands of the people.
The successful training test run of a 15B model in December of 2024 demonstrated the flexibility and robustness of Psyche:
• Successfully scaled from initial training through 11,000+ steps.
• Demonstrated ability to dynamically add compute nodes from data centers mid-training.
• Achieved higher training rates with additional nodes while maintaining stability.
• Validated extreme fault tolerance with zero impact from individual node failures.
• Optimized bandwidth usage through innovative adaptive transmission rates.
The seed algorithm of DisTrO, DeMo, was published by Bowen Peng, Chief Scientist at Nous, Jeffrey Quesnelle, Chief Technology Officer at Nous, and the co-founder of OpenAI, Diedrick P. Kingma. The test run was accomplished with compute from Oracle, Northern Data, Lambda Labs, Crusoe, and the Andromeda Cluster.
In a world where gods and mortals coexisted, Psyche, a mortal of extraordinary beauty, caught Cupid’s eye, sparking an illicit love that defied the forbidden unions between mortals and gods. Venus, outraged by their love, devised three trials to prove Psyche’s inadequacy. Despite the challenges, Psyche persevered, completing the first two trials with determination.
The final trial, retrieving a divine box from the Underworld, ultimately led to Psyche’s downfall, as Venus had tricked her and filled it with eternal slumber. However, Cupid realized Psyche’s resilience and revived her with Ambrosia, rendering her immortal. Venus and the Olympian Gods were forced to acknowledge Psyche as the Goddess of the Soul, cementing her story as a testament to humanity’s will to challenge powerful authority.
Psyche Phase 0: Testnet
Through carefully designed cryptographic incentive mechanisms, the Psyche Testnet motivates GPU owners to contribute their resources towards model training while ensuring the integrity of the work being performed.
The Psyche Testnet will host a variety of datacenter and consumer GPUs.
The Goals of Psyche Testnet:
- Refine a system that coordinates ML training across nodes.
- Improve fault tolerance; handle data availability failures and incomplete training.
- Minimize on-chain transactions.
- Test DisTrO in a global p2p open environment across a range of hardware.
- Ensure the Psyche network is reliable and robust.
To begin with, Testnet compute will be whitelisted. Periodically, a run will allow nodes to on-board and off-board. This will allow the network to add and remove compute resources depending on availability dynamically. The opportunity cost for compute providers will be low because they can leave a training run in favor of other opportunities should they arise.
The Psyche testnet will train using a variety of architectures, from standard pre-training, to MLA, and to novel fine-tunes.
The on-chain components of the Psyche Network testnet will be built on Solana. Robust developer documentation will be released with the launch of the Psyche Testnet, alongside the open-source Psyche codebase. A preview of the Psyche training code and Psyche design docs are available now.
If you are interested in joining us to cooperatively train a model on Psyche, contact us at [email protected]
HERMES ONWARDS
Nous’ flagship language model series Hermes has been downloaded over 50 million times. Hermes 3 powers a majority of social agents on X, Telegram, Discord, and within gaming environments. AI built for humans must be well-studied in living amongst us. We observe daily how the public uses language models, and identify the places to unlock stronger reasoning and expressiveness.
Nous Research intends to develop its open-source language models on the Psyche network by incorporating our research in architecture, fine-tuning, and inference-time scaling. In particular, we see reinforcement learning as an area of high potential in creating human-centric superintelligence. RL is efficiently overlaid atop the Psyche Network; the training objectives utilize multiple environments to align the model’s capabilities, allowing community participation through diverse contribution methods.
THE POWER OF PSYCHE'S AI
The Psyche Network leverages cryptographic engineering to coordinate, decentralize and catalyze the development of SOTA AI. Blockchains provide the technology that can facilitate that coordination, at scale, in a trust-minimized manner. Psyche enables AI development to be open-source, and meaningfully composable. The distributed nature of this approach eliminates single points of failure.
Over time, this process will reveal novel applications in empowering humans amidst automation. Transparent and accountable development of superintelligence is crucial for human safety. Psyche’s approach has far-reaching implications for the future of AI development and its potential to benefit humanity. The AI paradigm shifts with Psyche.
