Comment by cedws

6 months ago

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.

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.

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.