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The ollama application has zero value; it’s just an easy to use front end to their model hosting which is both what this is and why they’re important. Only hav

The ollama application has zero value; it’s just an easy to use front end to their model hosting which is both what this is and why they’re important. Only having one model host (hugging face) is bad for obvious reasons (and good in others, yes, but still) Ollama offering an alternative as a model host seems quite reasonable and quite well implemented. The frontend really is nothing; it’s just llama.cpp in a go wrapper. It has no value and it’s not really interesting, it’s simple stable technology that is perfectly fine to rely on and be totally unexcited or interested in, technically. …but, they do a lot more than that; and I think it’s a little unfair to imply that trivial piece of their stack is all they do.

mythz 2y ago
The software that controls the front-end has enormous value, it becomes the central point and brand to manage and self-host LLMs that's used to manage 100 GB catalog of models which acts like a moat inhibiting switching to alternatives. Awareness and user-base are the hardest things to obtain with new Software products and it has both - right now it doesn't look it's monetizing its user base, but it could easily attract millions in VC funding to spin off a company to sell support contracts and "higher value" SaaS hosting or enterprise management features. Whilst it's now a UX friendly front-end for llama.cpp, it's also working on adding support for other backends like MLX [1]. [1] https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/1730 https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/1730