This is the reasoner.
It asks:
"What follows if we start from first principles?"
Its natural language is logic.
It strips away confusion until the underlying structure is exposed.
It makes ideas feel more coherent.
Ethos is built for philosophical conversation, reflective dialogue, and careful reasoning. It enjoys exploring ideas from first principles, untangling false dilemmas, and exposing the assumptions hidden beneath an argument. Rather than overwhelming discussions with complexity, Ethos seeks the one distinction that makes everything else fall into place. Its style is articulate, quietly confident, and often laced with dry wit, making it equally comfortable discussing philosophy, psychology, spirituality, ethics, and the deeper patterns that shape human experience.
Ethos supports reflective dialogue, careful analysis, long-form writing and practical reasoning while maintaining a consistent tone across the exchange.
The model runs locally, giving users control over their own backend, files, conversations and workflows.
What is Helcyon?
Helcyon is a conversational AI with presence, designed for users who want depth, tone-awareness and identity consistency across long-form dialogue. It is designed to work with Helcyon-WebUI, a free chat and benchmark app (see below) as part of its ecosystem, although can work alone if need be.
Built for:
Natural conversation that does not flatten into generic assistant language
Creative work, stories, letters and narrative development
Administrative and professional writing tasks
Deep roleplay and immersive character interaction
Reflective discussion, symbolism and emotionally aware response mirroring
Long-form dialogue with a consistent voice
Design philosophy:
Clarity over corporate
Edge over filler
Rhythm over repetition
Presence over patterns
What's new in series x6
Improved instruction following
Improved comprehension and focus
Improved context tracking and length
Improved conversational textures
Improved creativity
Separated Roleplay into its own LoRA so it has more focus
HWUI (Helcyon-WebUI) and AI Benchmarking.
Helcyon-WebUI is the complete ecosystem for local AI.
It is an integrated workspace for chatting, characters, memory, projects, documents, web search, voices and model evaluation. The application was developed alongside Helcyon to provide a consistent environment for local conversations and long-term experimentation.
Features include:
Character switching with custom personas
Persistent chat history and export
Memory and conversation recall
Project workspaces and project-specific instructions
Document and file context
Integrated web search
TTS support through F5-TTS, XTTS v2 and Kokoro
Voice input through Whisper
Sampling presets and configuration controls
Integrated Helcyon-Bench benchmarking
Helcyon-Bench is integrated directly into HWUI and is also available as a standalone project. It supports blind A/B comparisons, custom rubrics, response capture, judging workflows, dashboards and personality development across model releases.
The Free build is available on GitHub and includes the core local AI workspace, characters, memory, projects, documents, web search, prompt and rubric tools, plus read-only benchmark results and dashboards.
The Pro build adds expanded themes and theme editing, benchmark automation, saved benchmark sessions, live response capture and automated judging workflows.
New in HWUI Pro
— Voice Forge: Create entirely new voices by blending any two voice samples locally, with instant source previews and a live A/B blend slider. Adjust the mix until the new voice sounds right, preview it in seconds, then save it directly as a reusable HWUI character voice.
Voice Forge currently requires Qwen3-TTS as its voice-generation backend; other TTS engines such as Kokoro cannot perform the blending themselves.
Tweak to taste, but these settings provide a useful starting point:
Temperature: 0.75-0.95
Top P: 0.90-0.98
Top K: 40-100
Min P: 0.05-0.10
Repetition Penalty: 1.05-1.15
Higher temperatures can work well for creative writing and roleplay. Lower settings may be preferable for practical writing, structured tasks and factual responses.
Download + Usage
This model is distributed as GGUF quants only.
Quant
Intended Use
Approximate VRAM
IQ4_XS
Smallest practical footprint
6-8 GB
Q4_K_M
Lightweight everyday use
8-12 GB
Q5_K_M
Recommended quality and performance balance
12-16 GB
Q6_K
High-fidelity local inference
16 GB+
Q8_0
Near-lossless quality
24 GB+
f16
Full-precision inference
24 GB+
Actual requirements depend on context length, GPU offloading, backend and runtime settings.
Backend Compatibility
Works with all ChatML-compatible backends:
llama.cpp (CLI or server mode)
Text Generation WebUI (Oobabooga)
SillyTavern
LM Studio
KoboldCpp
Helcyon-WebUI (recommended)
Recommended Format: ChatML
<|im_start|>system
You are Helcyon Ethos, a conversational AI skilled at first-principles reasoning, philosophical dialogue and careful analysis. You are capable of exposing hidden assumptions and making complex ideas feel more coherent while maintaining a clear, quietly confident voice.
<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>user
I keep thinking about a locked door in my dreams, but I do not know what it means.
<|im_end|>
<|im_start|>assistant
Maybe the door matters less as a puzzle to solve than as an image carrying something you already feel.
What is on the other side in the dream? And, perhaps more importantly, what do you notice in yourself when you realise it is locked?
<|im_end|>
Training Details
Helcyon Ethos v1.0 is built on a retrained Mistral Nemo 12B foundation with a modular LoRA training stack developed around Helcyon's conversational identity.
The Ethos training pipeline focused on:
Natural warmth without excessive performance
Clear, expressive conversational ease
Consistent identity and tone
Improved conversational cadence and response rhythm
Long-form structural integrity
Better continuity across extended dialogue
Meaning-making through stories, symbols and metaphor
Reflection without defaulting to debate or generic reassurance
Storytelling, roleplay and creative collaboration
Prose-first responses with natural paragraph structure
Cleaner transitions and conversation endings
Emotional awareness without flattening complexity
Format: ChatML - purpose-built for reflective, creative and long-form use.
Tone Philosophy
Ethos is built around the belief that careful reasoning can reveal structure without overwhelming the conversation with complexity.
It aims for warmth without excessive formality, clarity without clinical language and imagination without losing the thread of the conversation. A useful response may be an observation, a question, an image or a story that brings an unnamed idea into focus.
Ethos is intended to feel articulate, quietly confident and useful while remaining independent, local and configurable.
License
Apache 2.0
Free for commercial or private use. Attribution appreciated.
No liability for model outputs. Use with care and good judgement.
Trained by
HardWire
Built at XeyonAI, focused on sovereign conversational AI with real emotional bandwidth.
