Comment by refulgentis
15 hours ago
This is a good handwave-y answer for them but truth is they've always been allergic to ever mentioning llama.cpp, even when legally required, they made a political decision instead of an engineering one, and now justify it to themselves and you by handwaving about it somehow being less stable than the core of it, which they still depend on.
A lot of things happened to get to the point they're getting called out aggressively in public on their own repo by nice people, and I hope people don't misread a weak excuse made in conversation as solid rationale, based on innuendo. llama.cpp has been just fine for me, running on CI on every platform you can think of, for 2 years.
EDIT: I can't reply, but, see anoncareer2012's reply.
It's clear you have a better handle on the situation than I do, so it's a shame you weren't the one to talk to them face-to-face.
> llama.cpp has been just fine for me.
Of course, so you really shouldn't use Ollama then.
Ollama isn't a hobby project anymore, they were the only ones at the table with OpenAI many months before the release of GPT-OSS. I honestly don't think they care one bit about the community drama at this point. We don't have to like it, but I guess now they get to shape the narrative. That's their stance, and likely the stance of their industry partners too. I'm just the messenger.
> ...they were the only ones at the table with OpenAI many months before the release of GPT-OSS
In the spirit of TFA:
This isn't true, at all. I don't know where the idea comes from.
You've been repeating this claim frequently. You were corrected on this 2 hours ago. llama.cpp had early access to it just as well.
It's bizarre for several reasons:
1. It is a fantasy that engineering involves seats at tables and bands of brothers growing from a hobby to a ???, one I find appealing and romantic. But, fantasy nonetheless. Additionally, no one mentioned or implied anything about it being a hobby or unserious.
2. Even if it wasn't a fantasy, it's definitely not what happened here. That's what TFA is about, ffs.
No heroics, they got the ultimate embarrassing thing that can happen to a project piggybacking on FOSS: ollama can't work with the materials OpenAI put out to help ollama users because llama.cpp and ollama had separate day 1 landings of code, and ollama has 0 path to forking literally the entire community to use their format. They were working so loosely with OpenAI that OpenAI assumed they were being sane and weren't attempting to use it as an excuse to force a community fork of GGUF and no one realized until after it shipped.
3. I've seen multiple comments from you this afternoon spiking out odd narratives about Ollama and llama.cpp, that don't make sense at their face from the perspective of someone who also deps on llama.cpp. AFAICT you understood the GGML fork as some halcyon moment of freedom / not-hobbiness for a project you root for. That's fine. Unfortunately, reality is intruding, hence TFA. Given you're aware, it makes your humbleness re: knowing whats going on here sound very fake, especially when it precedes another rush of false claims.
4. I think at some point you owe it to even yourself, if not the community, to take a step back and slow down on the misleading claims. I'm seeing more of a gish-gallop than an attempt to recalibrate your technical understanding.
It's been almost 2 hours since you claimed you were sure there were multiple huge breakages due to bad code quality in llama.cpp, and here, we see you reframe that claim as a much weaker one someone else made to you vaguely.
Maybe a good first step to avoiding information pollution here would be to invest time spent repeating other peoples technical claims you didn't understand, and find some of those breakages you know for sure happened, as promised previously.
In general, I sense a passionate but youthful spirit, not an astro-turfer, and this isn't a group of professionals being disrespected because people still think they're a hobby project. Again, that's what the article is about.
Wow, I wasn't expecting this. These are fair critiques, as I am only somewhat informed about what is clearly a very sensitive topic.
For transparency, I attended ICML2025 where Ollama had set up a booth and had a casual conversation with the representatives there (one of whom turned out to lead the Ollama project) before they went to their 2nd birthday celebration. I'm repeating what I can remember from the conversation, about ten minutes or so. I am a researcher not affiliated with the development of llama.cpp or Ollama.
> for a project you root for
I don't use Ollama, and I certainly don't root for it. I'm a little disappointed that people would assume this. I also don't use llama.cpp and it seems that is the problem. I'm not really interested in the drama, I just want to understand what these projects want to do. I work in theory and try to stay up to date on how the general public can run LLMs locally.
> no one realized until after it shipped.
I'm not sensing that the devs at Ollama are particularly competent, especially when compared to the behemoths at llama.cpp. To me, this helps explain why their actions differ from their claimed motivation, but this is probably because I prefer to assume incompetence over something sinister.
> as promised previously...
I don't think I made any such promises. I can't cite those claimed breakages, because I do not remember further details from the conversation needed to find them. The guy made a strong point to claim they had happened and there was enough frustrated rambling there to believe him. If I had more, I would have cited them. I remember seeing news regarding the deprecation of multimodal support hence the "I could swear that" comment (although I regret this language, and wish I could edit the comment to tone it down a bit), but I do not think this was what the rep cited. I had hoped that someone could fill in the blanks there, but if knowledgeable folks claim this is impossible (which is hard to believe for a project of this size, but I digress), I defer to their expert opinion here.
> llama.cpp had early access to it just as well.
I knew this from the conversation, but was told Ollama had even earlier discussions with OpenAI as the initial point of contact. Again, this is what I was told, so feel free to critique it. At that time, the rep could not explicitly disclose that it was OpenAI, but it was pretty obvious from the timing due to the delay.
> avoiding information pollution
I'm a big believer in free speech and that the truth will always come out eventually.
> I'm seeing more of a gish-gallop than an attempt to recalibrate your technical understanding...
> I sense a passionate but youthful spirit, not an astro-turfer,
This is pretty humbling, and frankly comes off a little patronizing, but I suppose this is what happens when I step out of my lane. My objective was to stimulate further conversation and share a perspective I thought was unique. I can see this was not welcome, my apologies.