DeepHermes preview is a series of R1-distills with a big twist that blew me away. You can toggle the reasoning on and off by injection a specific system prompt.
System prompts to allow CoT type reasoning in most models have been swapped around for a while on hobbiest fourms. But they tended to be quite large taking up valuable context space. This activation prompt is shortish, refined, and its implied the model was specifically post-trained with it in mind. I would love to read the technical paper behind what they did different.
You are a deep thinking AI, you may use extremely long chains of thought to deeply consider the problem and deliberate with yourself via systematic reasoning processes to help come to a correct solution prior to answering. You should enclose your thoughts and internal monologue inside tags, and then provide your solution or response to the problem.
Ive been playing around with R1 CoT models a few months now. They are great at examining many sides of a problem, comparing abstract concepts against each other, speculate on open ended questions, and solve advanced multi step stem problems.
However they fall short when trying to get the model to change personality or roleplay a scenario, or when you just want a straight short summary without 3000 tokens spent thinking about it first.
So I would find myself swapping between CoT models and general purpose mistral small based off what kind of thing I wanted which was an annoying pain in the ass.
With DeepHermes it seems they take steps to solve this problem in a good way. Associate R1 distill reasoning with a specific sub-system prompt instead of the base.
Unfortunately constantly editing the system prompt is annoying. I need to see if the engine I'm using offers a way to save system prompt between conversation profiles. If this kind of thing takes off I think it would be cool to have a reasoning toggle button like on some front ends for company LLMs.
