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Comment by cedws | Hacker News Reader

The way Ollama has basically been laundering llama.cpp’s features as its own felt dodgy, this appears to confirm there’s something underhanded going on.

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I did not assume the worst when submitting the post, but that is also my suspicion. The whole thing is very dodgy.

Are closer to the metal AI developers an under tracked bottle neck? AMD and Intel can barely get off the ground due to lagging software developers.

This is where I want to work. But I feel like an AI swe is more likely to go "down" than an AI company is likely to hire me, a guy who loves optimizing pipelines for parallelism.

Metal is an Apple thing, not Intel or AMD. (And Ollama supports that.)

I assume they mean closer to the figurative metal, not literal Metal.

"Close to the metal" is an expression.

Also the name of AMD’s (well ATI) previous attempt at a CUDA alternative ;)

I think it's important to bring up the face that llama.cpp has an MIT license[0]. Notably, the MIT license "permits reuse within proprietary software, provided that all copies of the software or its substantial portions include a copy of the terms of the MIT License and also a copyright notice.[1]"

You'll find that Ollama is also distributed under an MIT license[2]. It's fine to disagree with their priorities and lack of transparency. But trying to argue how they use code from other repositories that permit such a thing is tilting at windmills, IMHO.

[0] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/blob/master/LICENSE

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_License

[2] https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/LICENSE

Ollama is a private for profit company, of course there's something shady going on.

Ollama is a private for profit AI company, of course there's something shady going on.

Because apparently you can take unethical business practices, add AI, and suddenly it's a whole new thing that no one can judge!

Well yes, though I was thinking more that they have no clear way to get income besides VCs and need to figure out a way to monetize in some weird way eventually. I would not have predicted them taking Nvidia money to axe AMD compatibility though lol.

It would be extremely unsurprising if Nvidia was funding this embrace and extend behind the scenes.

It would be pretty surprising to their shareholders if Nvidia was hiding where it was spending it's money.

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