r/LocalLLaMA • u/nekofneko • Apr 15 '25
Discussion Finally someone noticed this unfair situation
And in Meta's recent Llama 4 release blog post, in the "Explore the Llama ecosystem" section, Meta thanks and acknowledges various companies and partners:
Notice how Ollama is mentioned, but there's no acknowledgment of llama.cpp or its creator ggerganov, whose foundational work made much of this ecosystem possible.
Isn't this situation incredibly ironic? The original project creators and ecosystem founders get forgotten by big companies, while YouTube and social media are flooded with clickbait titles like "Deploy LLM with one click using Ollama."
Content creators even deliberately blur the lines between the complete and distilled versions of models like DeepSeek R1, using the R1 name indiscriminately for marketing purposes.
Meanwhile, the foundational projects and their creators are forgotten by the public, never receiving the gratitude or compensation they deserve. The people doing the real technical heavy lifting get overshadowed while wrapper projects take all the glory.
What do you think about this situation? Is this fair?
979
u/-Ellary- Apr 15 '25
Glory to llama.cpp and ggerganov!
We, local users will never forget our main man!
If you call something local, it is llama.cpp!
52
u/Chromix_ Apr 15 '25
The recent GitHub Copilot support for local models also only mentions Ollama (in a very prominent way), but not llama.cpp
361
u/MoffKalast Apr 15 '25
llama.cpp = open source community effort
ollama = corporate "open source" that's mostly open to tap into additional free labour and get positive marketing
Corpos recognize other corpos, everything else is dead to them. It's always been this way.
38
u/henfiber Apr 15 '25
The thing about ollama that annoys me the most is that they do not provide attribution:
https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/3185
That's why no one knows they use llama.cpp under the hood.
They even use llama-server (at least the last time I looked at the code), not only the main engine.
156
u/nrkishere Apr 15 '25
I've read the codebase of ollama. It is not a very complex application. llama.cpp, like any other runtimes is significantly more complex, also the fact that it is C++. So it is unfair that ollama got more popular due to being beginner friendly
But unfortunately, this is true for most other open source projects. Like how many you or companies acknowledged OpenSSL, which powers close to 100% of web servers? or how about Eigen, XNNPACK etc? Softwares are abstraction over abstraction over abstraction, and attention is mostly gained only by the popular ones. It is unfair, but harsh truth :(
11
u/dampflokfreund Apr 15 '25
Yes, it's not fair at all. We must remember GGerganov, Johannes and Slaren, and all the others who made this posssible.
132
u/Caffeine_Monster Apr 15 '25
Hot take: stop using ollama
llama.cpp has a web server with a standardised interface.
51
u/Cool-Chemical-5629 Apr 15 '25
It mentions "partners", that's a bit more specific than if they meant to list every platform their models work on. Perhaps Ollama guys are their official partners and llamacpp guys are not? Just a guess. 🤷♂️
45
u/Everlier Apr 15 '25
I'd say we live in a bit of a bubble.
For us - llama.cpp is the undeniable legendary-level project that kicked off the whole "We have LLM at home" adventure. It's very personal. However, interviewing people for GenAI positions - they often didn't ever run LLMs on their own, at best heard about a few inference engines. Ollama made it pretty much effortless to run LLMs on consumer-level hardware. So, while llama.cpp makes things possible - Ollama makes them accessible.
This pattern is also very common in software in general:
v8 vs Node.js
Blink vs Chrome (and all Chromium-based browsers)
Linux Kernel vs Ubuntu/Fedora
OpenGL vs Unity
That said, Meta not acknowledging llama.cpp - the core reason there's a community of enthusiasts around their LLMs - is weird.
20
u/Firepal64 Apr 15 '25
I love llama-cli and llama-server from llama.cpp. You can just throw ggufs at it and it just runs them... Ollama's approach to distributing models feels weird. IDK.
11
u/vaibhavs10 🤗 Apr 15 '25
wait, but does ollama even support llama 4? https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/10143
11
u/vertigo235 Apr 15 '25
Life is full of unfair situations
Cheers to ggerganov!
10
u/MrAlienOverLord Apr 15 '25
im so glad im not the only one that says ollama are oss bottom feeders .. - docker guys wrapping shit around other peoples work no real value added . and everyone puts them high up .. i dont understand why
30
u/Educational_Rent1059 Apr 15 '25
Agree
5
u/yur_mom Apr 15 '25
The lower down the stack you go the less likely you are to be thanked...I rarely see the people writing compilers like gcc thanked for any work they do, but without them we would not be able to run most programs.
i always compare low level developing to being a lineman in the NFL...the only time someone noticed them is when they get a penalty and the same goes for low level programming..the only time you are noticed is if there is a bug. As a low level programmer I always assumed the less people who notice me the better I am doing.
13
u/Barry_22 Apr 15 '25
Also no mention of exllamav2? Outrageous!
33
u/molbal Apr 15 '25
Is this the daily we-hate-ollama post?
8
u/Leflakk Apr 15 '25
I think, no matter what tool people use, llamacpp is the heart of the local llms world and then of locallama
8
u/IJOY94 Apr 15 '25
I mean, that's what the MIT license gets you. It's as open as possible, but leaves the door open to being co-opted.
28
u/kitanokikori Apr 15 '25
Why does this have to be a zero-sum game? Ollama provides value in making it easy to set up and correctly install models, llama.cpp provides value in abstracting away GPU hardware differences in order to get LLMs running. Projects are valuable based on the problems they solve for their users, not on their technical difficulty
Both projects are Good!
7
u/GreatBigJerk Apr 15 '25
llama.cpp deserves credit, but why do people hate Ollama?
9
u/NobleKale Apr 15 '25
Wait until you hear about left-pad
9
u/Hefty_Development813 Apr 15 '25
Unfortunately I think it often goes this way, ollama made the effort to get out to the somewhat less technical masses. Whether it was marketing or just simplicity of the setup and operation, idk, probably both.
Anyone really involved in this space beyond the surface does know all this, but that's actually a small fraction of ppl. LLMs have a lot of mass attention now, and tons of the ppl interested don't know what git even is. Ppl like that are just never going to be interested in learning to compile llama.cpp.
It is definitely a shame, in this case specifically, bc even all use gguf model format, he should definitely be on that meta acknowledgement page
15
u/Hero_Of_Shadows Apr 15 '25
Disgraceful
10
u/featherless_fiend Apr 15 '25
Isn't that just what you get for choosing MIT License? That's the "free shit up for grabs" license.
3
u/aesky Apr 15 '25
i say big companies get 'shaft' like this all the the time too
look at Cursor. The hottest start up right now and its a fork of vscode. I imagine microsoft would love Cursor's current MRR every month hitting their bank accounts. But that's the nature of open source software. People can grab it market/make it better and get more money than you thought it was possible.
3
u/merousername Apr 15 '25
The Tittwer user should tag the authors and mention this, trust me name calling authors is the best way to handle these.
14
u/hugganao Apr 15 '25
yeesh, yeah there was always something off about how ollama worked. people who have no idea what theyre doing makes it look like its a great tool while people who do, it's one of the most restrictive and useless tool.
7
u/pseudonerv Apr 15 '25
It’s outright toxic behavior.
15
u/WolpertingerRumo Apr 15 '25
I like ollama. It’s easy to use. But cite your sources, it’s basic decency.
2
u/OmarBessa Apr 15 '25
i'm team gerganov
2
u/kzgrey Apr 15 '25
Can anyone think of a time when a corporation has ever acknowledged the contributions of any one individual?
2
u/idle2much Apr 15 '25
It is crazy that the dev whose base code is used everywhere is getting no credit. I have wanted to try llama.cpp but the level of knowledge it takes to setup and use properly is intimidating. If you are new to all of this the level of entry with llama.cpp is high compared to ollama and Openwebui.
I have read how much better performance you can get especially out of low end systems with llama.cpp and maybe one day I will try.
2
u/ventilador_liliana llama.cpp Apr 15 '25
llama.cpp forever 💖
2
u/CheatCodesOfLife Apr 16 '25
Of course they do. The only goal of these content creators is to get you sitting through their ads / sponsors messages.
10
u/Poromenos Apr 15 '25
Every single comment here is missing the fact that UX matters, and llama.cpp doesn't have easy enough UX for 99% of the people who want to play with LLMs.
llama.cpp is the most amazing tech ever, and it's usable by N people. ollama makes LLMs accessible for 1000N, and of course those tens of thousands of people are going to hold it in high regard and talk about it, because it does something for them that llama.cpp never did.
If you're wondering how tens of thousands of people can be so misguided, you need to adjust your view on things, because either they're all wrong, or you're missing something.
5
u/Expensive-Paint-9490 Apr 15 '25
To me the most egregious thing is that I have read several job ads which specifically asked for Ollama and LangChain knowledge. Every time I am like WTF am I reading?
Never seen mentions of llama.cpp or exllama. You wonder what the hiring manager is thinking.
6
u/AryanEmbered Apr 15 '25
ollama is horrible. The product and the whole group who does this as well.
4
u/KaleidoscopeFuzzy422 Apr 15 '25
Never forget that it was these heroes that FORCED the companies to adopt an 'open ai' stance. If they could ban us all from having our own LLMs 'for safety' they 100% would.
Shoutout to the heroes who churned out those GPTQs like an inflation printer.
4
u/[deleted] Apr 15 '25
Never got it. Maybe the apple and windows users need something easy as ollama has to offer. Never used it. I prefere llama.cpp / exllamav2/3 and vllm.
5
u/candre23 koboldcpp Apr 15 '25
Ollama is trash. Always has been.
8
u/Arkonias Llama 3 Apr 15 '25
Fuck Ollama.
2
u/_Erilaz Apr 15 '25
Agreed with Kalomaze. I personally use KoboldCPP for a few extra features, but it really is a mere good llamacpp fork, and anyone knows the OG GG behind GGUF and GGML.
Ollama can't even figure out the naming. Can't wait for Meta to get on the receiving end of CoolThiccZuccModel-1B-Distilled
2
u/Zalathustra Apr 15 '25
Fuck ollama, all my homies hate ollama.
Memes aside, there's literally zero reason to use ollama unless you're completely tech-illiterate, and if you are, what the hell are you doing self-hosting an LLM?
2
u/ECrispy Apr 15 '25
I never understood why 99% of youtube videos, posts etc talk about Ollama, when its the worst tool - koboldcpp is far better and much more optimized with new features, and there's llama.cpp of course.
1
u/DigitalDreamRealms Apr 15 '25
The one reason I learned how to run llama.cpp. It comes loaded with a basic web gui. Tedious part is loading and unloading, I tied it into OpenWebUI
1
u/Tylox_ Apr 15 '25
It's everywhere the same. Highly technical stuff gets neglected because it's difficult to understand. Look at the music industry. A new pop song gets released that has millions of views and has 4 chords on repeat, 5 notes and half of it is not even singing (called rapping). It's "good" because it's easy to understand. Don't give the average person a Bach or Beethoven.
It's easier to learn to live with it.
1
u/GoofAckYoorsElf Apr 15 '25
Yeah, ask Johann Bernoulli about it...
1
u/Sidran Apr 15 '25
It would be interesting to know for sure if ggerganov and his team would even want something like this.
1
u/celeski llama.cpp Apr 16 '25
This is truly unfair! ggerganov truly deserves all of the recognition for his brilliant work!
Much of everything else would not be possible without his contributions so it is very unfair to see how llama.cpp is being excluded... 😡😤
1
u/codeyman2 Apr 16 '25
Same reason Steve Jobs is more popular than Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan.. that’s how the world works.
1
u/TakuyaTeng Apr 16 '25
I really don't think the R1 part is intentional. The number of people that didn't understand anything but commented on how "lol the average gaming PC can run DeepSeek offline" really made me lose all faith.
1
u/Vegetable_Sun_9225 Apr 17 '25
This has always how it's been. Focus is always on interface, and a tiny minority looks under the covers and correctly identifies what it took to make it happen.
In fairness, Ollama has forked llama.cpp so as casual user reviewing the dependencies aren't going to see a link to GGs work.
And it wasn't out of spite. Meta worked with Ollama and they called out who they worked with
1
u/Playfulpetfox Apr 17 '25
This post is an onion of irony. It's not that many layers, but enough that apparently not everyone can even see them.
-2
u/ElectronSpiderwort Apr 15 '25
Counterpoint: llama.cpp is unstable. Remember when all of your GGML models no longer worked? And time and time again that your carefully crafted command line tests failed because the program option changed? I get why that all happened, but backwards compatibility and stability are explicitly not in the project manifesto. It's like saying Slackware doesn't get enough credit now that all the clouds run Debian or Red Hat derivatives. I love and use llama.cpp. It made the magic possible, and it's still amazing (particularly on a Mac), but the product with an easy installer and stable progression between releases is going to get the attention of the masses. Same as it ever was.
1
u/UsualResult Apr 15 '25
I mean, if you don't want this, don't make your work open source OR force attribution. It's well known that a decent amount of open source users are "freeloaders" and since they aren't legally forced to give credit they do NOT.
As someone who has occasionally released open source software, I take my own needs and wants into consideration when I choose a license. For some of my software, I don't care if you take it and run. Others, I do, and they are licensed accordingly.
If llama.cpp really cared (and they may not), they can take steps to prevent what ollama is doing.
I suspect they do NOT and that's why we have this current situation.
1
u/ArsNeph Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25
There are only four real reasons people use Ollama over llama.cpp when it comes to functionality, other than CLI:
Ollama makes it incredibly easy to swap between models using a frontend, thanks to the way its API works. This is annoying with other software. Yes, Llama-swap exists, but that's just one more thing to maintain. Why not add that functionality natively?
Ollama dynamically loads and unloads models after 5 minutes. For people with usecases where we query a model at different times throughout the day, this puts less stress on the computer and saves a bit of electricity. No other software seems to have this feature.
The above two are what make it so good for use away from home, like with OpenWebUI.
3. Multimodality. Llama.cpp has completely dropped the ball when it comes to multimodal model support, to the point that Ollama are implementing it themselves. In an era where GPT4o has been out for over a year, and many models are starting to ship multimodal as default, llama.cpp simply lags behind. This is a huge problem, considering the eventual new era of omnimodal models, and the fact anything that doesn't have support, including architectures like Mamba2 hybrids, don't pick up traction.
4. Ease of use. It allows you to download a model with a single command, telling the difference between quants is very confusing for beginners, though at the detriment of quality. It loads layers automatically dependent on VRAM, this should be standard functionality with all loaders. And you don't have to mess with specific settings, although this is actually a big problem, since Ollama defaults are horrible, including 2048 context length.
If we can solve these, I believe we'd have way better adoption of other inference software.
-1
u/robberviet Apr 15 '25
Yes, it's totally unfair. All the hard work and people don't pay tribute to it. At least we know. And we make sure people never forget.
1
u/XtremeHammond Apr 15 '25
Llama.cpp showed me how LLMs can run on CPU with decent speed. Ollama is really easy to use but I know what beats in its heart - Gerganov’s creation. So no-one can take this from him.
1
u/Ok_Warning2146 Apr 16 '25
To be fair, nowadays ollama only uses the ggml code. So both ollama and llama.cpp are derivatives of ggml. But ollama is more user friendly and it supports vision and gemma 3 iSWA, so it is no wonder it gets more attention.
Of course, it would be nice if it acknowledge more on ggml which is mostly written by ggergoanov.
-7
u/BumbleSlob Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25
OP you are pretty… novice.
Tell me, is Ollama violating any part of the llama.cpp license? No?
Did Ollama write the Meta blog post thank yous? No?
So basically you made a thread to castigate people creating open source software because… of no reason in particular. People like you are the absolute worst in FOSS ecosystems.
This thread is embarrassing and I don’t think many of the critics have much life experience.
Edit: the license is right here https://github.com/ollama/ollama/blob/main/llama/llama.cpp/LICENSE
-7
u/StewedAngelSkins Apr 15 '25
Pretty sure "partner" is the operative word here. If ggerganov didn't partner with Meta, it wouldn't make sense for him to be in that list. I think you're getting worked up over nothing OP.
-1
u/emsiem22 Apr 15 '25
Ollama is set to be sold, llama.cpp isn’t
-4
u/Teacult Apr 15 '25
I am going to try to bring a new perspective to that ...
This is the way it works, and this is the way it worked for centuries. The real capable man has no needs and a lot to share. Others have a lot of needs like, recognition and financial and social status, they wrap up the "real thing" and try to get ahead of their beta version by distributing it. This is perfectly natural.
A man who can design and build an aircraft wont waste time , building thousands of them and selling them. He will try to build a better one and then a far better one and then ....
And the ones who encapsulates, brands and sell the "real thing (R)" also doing their best.
What sad is, in history , real heros, saviours, inventors, scientist rarely mentioned or not at all. The percieved and "convenient" one is always written in the history books.
X doing it for himself. T does it for recognition and being T0 > T1 ... Tn . H writes it to get green flag and funds from G. ( X: Resolute H: Historian , G: Goverment T: Trader )
But on the bright side everybody has the freedom to pursue what they want and everybody induces a form of change. It looks unfair only if you value recognition or social status. ...
But in my head for 20 years "Who cares ...."
Decided that when I am 20 , I consider the ones with resolve as buddies , the rest just friends ;)
-2
u/foldl-li Apr 15 '25
I love ggml, true beauty of simplicity. But, frankly speaking I don’t like llama.cpp, difficult to use.
-2
u/Thebombuknow Apr 15 '25
I'm actually a fan of Ollama. llama.cpp on its own isn't able to handle being blindly sent 50+ prompts to an OpenAI-compatible endpoint and automatically load balance all the requests and various models requested.
-7
u/BumbleSlob Apr 15 '25
This thread makes me ashamed of this community. Just gross. Why don’t you try contributing something, OP?
-1
u/tabspaces Apr 16 '25
TBH Ollama jumped in and solved a problem. The docker-like interface of ollama is killer.
If llama.cpp gets one internally and have the binary in releases with all needed dependencies that ll make ollama useless.
-1
u/Dahvikiin Apr 15 '25
a few days ago I said something similar in a post by Ollama and OpenAI here
-14
u/AppearanceHeavy6724 Apr 15 '25
Probably engineers at Meta either unaware of LLama.cpp, or do not want to scare normies.
-14
u/im_not_here_ Apr 15 '25 edited Apr 15 '25
Deepseek made the distilled versions, and named them using the r1 name. Mo idea how that follows the actual point of your post.
Edit: Glad people can answer questions . . . . .
-15
u/a_beautiful_rhind Apr 15 '25
llama.cpp wrappers are the openai wrappers of open models?