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Comment by prologic | Hacker News Reader

Is llama.cpp (and thus llama.app) really that much better than Ollama? I've Only ever played with Ollama, so geniously curious to hear other's real-world experiences.

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"Friends don't let friends use ollama" https://sleepingrobots.com/dreams/stop-using-ollama/

> Is llama.cpp (and thus llama.app)

llama.app is just an URL (for the "advertisement" webpages of llama.cpp outside GitHub).

> that much better than Ollama

llama.cpp is the real thing, ollama was a fork that remained inferior.

I was playing with ollama because of name recognition. I was finding pretty quickly that the selection of models on the "ollama store" was pretty stale, and gguf models on huggingface are technically downloadable but don't work as well.

The "friends don't let friends use ollama" article linked in another comment convinced me to try llama-swap. I find it easier to directly deal with gguf files. Hard to quantify, but the outputs of the LLM seem better too. Asking the same gguf the same question with the same chat harness, I subjectively find llama.cpp does better. Might be some different defaults. I haven't dug deeply.

ollama uses llama.cpp

The dev behind ollama is adamant that ollama doesn't use llama.cpp (based on a technicality -- it uses ggml, which is created by the same people behind llama.cpp and is the backend of llama.cpp)

He made such a big fuss about ollama implementing their own kernels and felt slighted about the online comments saying ollama didn't properly credit llama.cpp and it kind of left a bad taste in the mouth among the local inference community.

For me personally, it was this that made me avoid them at all costs: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/11714#issuecomment-3...

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