Comment by hodgehog11

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.