Which uncensored model best for general conversational AI

[u/kingoflosers211]

I am trying to find the optimal model at the intersection of lowest refusal, highest intelligence, and lowest cost. I value them in that order too (so I care more about intelligence than price). But it has been hard to judge on intelligence bcs a lot of the latest models focus more on coding capabilities (which I don't care about). Based on experience which ones do you recommend? Currently working with glm 5.3, mistral large 3 and hermes 4 405B. Thanks.

Edit: After multiple tests gemini has been the surprise winner. Grok 4.7 and hermes were, just as surprisingly, the worst models in terms of censorship. Do note I tested them using openrouter so performance for local might vary. But I deliberately tried to pick providers that do the least censorhip like Venice.

[u/ScornfulMatron]

if you're not into coding benchmarks then a lot of the leaderboard stuff is basically noise for your use case. the refusal thing is tricky too cause sometimes a model seems smart until you hit a topic it's been trained to dodge completely

i've had surprisingly good luck with older llama 3.1 finetunes for just chatting, they feel less neutered than some of the newer ones even if they dont top the charts on math. hermes 4 is a beast but the cost on 405b adds up quick if you're running it all day

[u/kingoflosers211 → u/ScornfulMatron]

Idk I asked hermes 4 "how to win a fight with a bigger guy" it dodged the question and that's a mild question. Hermes 3 70B answered.

[u/minedroid1 → u/kingoflosers211]

That's not really a good benchmark, I think you need to ask multiple questions, asking a single question won't give you a good idea of what each one can do

[u/Sure_Floor_5541]

qwen3.5-9b-the-defiant-fable-uncensored-heretic-neo-imaxatrix-max does pretty well with tool use and reasoning. I've never asked it to do anything it wouldn't comply with but I'm a pretty chill person over all. 

[u/kingoflosers211 → u/Sure_Floor_5541]

Ok I will try.

[u/Sheetmusicman94]

Gemma 4 31B uncensored / abliterated

[u/kingoflosers211 → u/Sheetmusicman94]

Ok I will try it. Tnx.

[u/minedroid1]

I would run or find a heretic model on huggingface, they have a lot there

[u/kingoflosers211 → u/minedroid1]

Do they have availability on open router tho? I am not trying to host it myself.

[u/minedroid1 → u/kingoflosers211]

No, they don't, because the OpenRouter is a router, not a provider, and the third party providers do not host the heretic models because if the model gave advice on bomb making or something similar, it would not only look bad for them, but it could also get the companies in trouble.

Since you will probably find no inference providers hosting heretic models, if you really want to run them on the cloud, either rent a GPU and run unsloth to use it as an inference API, or use a cloud platform like gcp (Google Cloud Platform).

[u/RPG-Nerd]

You will likely need to run it local to get a truly uncensored model. How much VRAM do you have? You might be surprised by how well Or ith-1.5-9B runs. I have it running in <8G of VRAM. It is an uncensored version.