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Comment by andrewmutz | Hacker News Reader

Ollama is a business? They raised money? I thought it was just a useful open source product.

I wonder how they plan to monetize their users. Doesn't sound promising.

There are very few recently launched pure open source projects these days (most are at least running donation-ware models or funded by corporate backers), none in the AI space that I'm aware of.

Well the real open source project is llama.cpp which Ollama basically wrapped and made a nice interface on top of. Now they do more things as they want to be a real business, but llama.cpp is now doing most things people wanted from something like ollama, like serving a REST API compatible with OpenAPI, downloading and managing local LLMs… while remaining an actual open source project without VC money as far as I know.

https://codingwithintelligence.com/p/meta-gets-behind-open-s...

This is a new umbrella project for llama.cpp and whisper.cpp. The author, Georgi Gerganov, also announced he’s forming a company for the project as he raised money from Nat Friedman (CEO GitHub) and Daniel Gross (ex-YC AI, ex-Apple ML).

Not sure if this is just a good faith support.

They are former Docker employees running Docker playbook.

[flagged]

Ollama is a ycombinator startup, so I guess they have to find some roi at some point.[1]

I personally found Ollama to be an easy way to try out local LLMs and appreciate them for that (and I still use it to download small models on my laptop and phone (via termux)), but I've long switched to llama.cpp + llama-swap[2] on my dev desktop. I download whatever ggufs I want from hugging face and just do `git pull` and `cmake --build build --config Release` from my llama.cpp directory whenever I want to update.

1: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ollama 2: https://github.com/mostlygeek/llama-swap

The launched a hosted platform a while back

Until I saw your reply I had thought this post is about OpenAI lol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com