LFM2.5-2.6B: New FREE Local AI 🤯

We may have just found the fastest, local, and best model with Hermes Agent that you can run an actual setup. So I've been testing out LFM. It just dropped today. It's LFM 2.5 2.6b and it is carefully designed for device and ultra fast server-side deployments.

This means it's basically really fast. It also has memory footprints and it's been trained on Hermes as a harness. You can also run it locally and it's pretty easy to set up as your local agent and then you can plug it into your harness. So for example, we've got Hermes Agent running with LFM.

So far, pretty impressive as it goes performance-wise. Now you can see how it performs on the benchmarks. For me personally, I like to test this stuff myself but from what I'm seeing so far, it's actually faster than Gemma 4 and better than Gemma 4 and I'll show you some examples in a minute in terms of what it can build and how it works. Now the great thing about this is that we can run it for free locally inside Hermes.

You might say, why would you want to run this model inside Hermes when there's so many local models? Well, one of the best things about this is that it's literally trained for Hermes Agent. So they've trained it inside the agent harnesses people use. If you actually look at the demo video, it is using Hermes Agent as the actual training system.

So you can see, for example, add four stages of post-training. Now I am not 100% an expert on this but basically it runs through the four stages which are SFT, expert specialization, multi-domain on policy distillation and agentic RL. Again, do I know what all those things mean? Can I explain it to you in a simplified way?

No. I want to be 100% transparent with you but I will say that it's basically designed for agents. So the last stage of post-training is multi-turn agentic RL through Pi, Hermes Agent and OpenCore. This is the important part because if you want to run a free local model that's actually decent, that's actually good with Hermes Agent, this is one of the best ones you could use.

Also, this would be fantastic for running as a sub-agent to actually get stuff done. When I've been testing it over here, it's pretty good. It's pretty fast and it actually responds intelligently and I'll show you why that is as well. Now this is designed for high volume agentic work and one of the things that I'll say here is like when I run a model locally, typically with Hermes, it slows my whole setup down to a ridiculous rate.

With this whole system, it was way faster and also we can just get the model here. You can also see that it's designed for deploying agents everywhere. So it's one of the best sort of models that you could run, for example, even on mobile devices. I think that's what they're getting at here.

Now you also see here, for example, one of the benefits is that when you're running local agents, it's private, right? So when you use a local model, it's not sending your data to the cloud. Whereas, for example, you look at a lot of the models out there that are actually decent APIs for Hermes, most of them send your data to the cloud because they're cloud-based APIs and also you're limited in terms of resources because it's a paid API. LFM 2.5, 2.6b is actually performing pretty good on the benchmarks and it's fast and it's local.

So let's test it out here, for example, if we run it with a skill like forward slash learn and then we'll give it a guide to learn from. We'll just see how it performs for tool use. So we've plugged in the command right there and whilst that's running in the background, let's talk about the system. Now, actually Oxcero posted a really good tweet about this and they basically said, best model for your local hardware, 8 gigabytes, trained in Hermes, trained on a ridiculous amount of tokens and can navigate phones, computers and other things.

So if we test it for tool calls here, you can see it says the skill has been successfully learned. So it can call tools, it can create skills and it can search the web using this API. So basically what it would do is use the built-in API which is Firecrawl and then it searched the web, looked through this guide, created a skill locally about it and we've done that with three models. So it's actually gentic, it's actually useful and it's pretty fast.

Plus it didn't affect any of my setup. It was really, really fast to run and not slow at all. Now, you don't just have to use this with AI agents. So you could actually go over to a local engine like we've built out this custom local engine here.

We can switch between the models, we actually plugged in Maple and then we can code directly inside here and we can preview what we've built once it's created and everything gets saved inside the workspace. But whether you're coding with it locally like so or you're using it gentically inside Hermes, you can still use this and get the most out of it. You can have it working in both ways. Also the great thing is this can plug into our memory system.

So we have Obsidian set up here and we could use Hermes agent with Obsidian and with LFM. So let's try this. I'm going to say check my Obsidian memory locally and then give me some SEO keyword ideas for content I should create in the future and let's test how it performs when it comes to tool calling with memory. It's already pretty good at using the skills inbuilt to Hermes like learn.

It's already pretty fast, it's free to use as well because we're running it locally and also it's private and we can switch the Wi-Fi off or we could go on a plane and still use this without Wi-Fi. So now it's looked through our memories, found some relevant keywords for example like Quen agent OS setup guide or Quen 3.8 max agent OS. Hermes Quen integration guide. So these are very personalized keywords based on our Obsidian memory.

It actually came back pretty quickly as well and it works quite nicely. The other cool thing about this is you can use it for frontier builds. So we could use something like for example Grok build as the brain of the engine and then we can delegate subtasks directly to LFM for like the grunt work, for the work that takes up a lot of tokens but doesn't need a frontier brain. And so in terms of the old way versus the new way, before every message was a paid API key, all of your data went to the cloud, running Hermes wasn't really possible without a paid API and if you didn't have any Wi-Fi you couldn't use your Hermes agent and also you were just very very careful about tokens.

Now with this system you can run LFM locally, it's not slow anymore with local models, it's a lot faster, nothing leaves your machine, it's private by default, it can still work 24-7 with scheduled tasks, you can work on a plane, you can work without Wi-Fi and you can still use frontier models as the brain if you want to and just delegate to LFM for the difficult time consuming but non-frontier tasks. And you might say okay this isn't free, sometimes I get that in the comments but it's like Hermes agent is an open source free system, LFM is a free local model. And so just to recap, Hermes supplies the hands, LFM 2.5 supplies the brain, 2.6 billion parameters, trained on 34 trillion tokens, 128k contacts, living entirely on your machine. The setup is just a few commands, you can run it with Hugging Face or LFM Studio and it's actually pretty good.

I wouldn't use this for coding tasks, honestly I would just use it for agenda tasks, that is what it's designed for. Now if you want to get our full system with local models running for free with Hermes agent and the Hermes agent OS, the setup where you can have multiple profiles, some running on free local models like this and much more training on Hermes agent as well, you can get this all inside the AI Profit Boardroom, link in the comments description or go to the AIprofitboardroom.com, inside the community you can ask questions, get help and support in real time. I personally answer these questions on a daily basis with video tutorial and there's always someone online ready to help you whenever you need to. Inside the classroom you can get access to all of our best trainings, if you want the Hermes agent OS you can grab that over here, if you want more training on local models we've got lots of different trainings here and if you want to jump on weekly coaching calls where you can share your screen, ask questions, get help and support in real time, you can do that inside the calendar.

Inside the map you can meet people in your local area who are building out with AI agents like you and this is all available inside the AI Profit Boardroom, link in the comments description or go to the AIprofitboardroom.com. Thanks for watching.