ollama is extremely convenient wrapper around llamacpp. they separate serving heavy weights from model definition and usage itself. what that means is weights

ollama is extremely convenient wrapper around llamacpp. they separate serving heavy weights from model definition and usage itself. what that means is weights of some model, let's say mixtral are loaded on the server process (and kept in memory for 5m as default) and you interact with it by using modelfile (inspired by dockerfile) - all your modelfiles that inherit FROM mixtral will reuse those weights already loaded in memory, so you can instantly swap between different system prompts etc - those appear as normal models to use through cli or ui. the effect is that you have very low latency, very good interface - for programming api and ui. ps. it's not only for macs open weight models + (llama.app) as ollama + ollama-webui = real openai.