Helcyon Ethos 12B - First-Principles Reasoning, Local and Independent
Model Name: Helcyon-Ethos-v1.0-12b-GGUF
Version: v1.0
Series x6
Owner: HardWire
Base: Mistral Nemo 12B (full-weight retrained - Mercury base, purpose-built for Ethos conversation)
Quantized GGUFs: IQ4_XS, Q4_K_M, Q5_K_M, Q6_K, Q8_0, f16
Tags: local-llm, conversational, companion, emotional-intelligence, long-context, roleplay, creative-writing
What is Helcyon Ethos?
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.
Download Helcyon-WebUI Free on GitHub | Get Helcyon-WebUI Pro on Gumroad
Recommended Sampling Settings for SillyTavern
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)SillyTavernLM StudioKoboldCppHelcyon-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.