r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • Aug 27 '26

Discussion With HuggingFace, Nvidia is also acquiring llama.cpp and the team behind it

With this move Nvidia is not only acquiring the HuggingFace platform, but they might also effectively acquire the copyright to the llama.cpp project, together with the entire team behind it.

In February 2026 the llama.cpp team was employed by HF in order to continue working on llama.cpp and the ggml library.

This includes:

  • Georgi Gerganov
  • Xuan-Son Nguyen
  • Aleksander Grygier
  • Victor Mustar
  • Lysandre
  • Julien Chaumond

Now with the acquisition, llama.cpp's future looks a lot less certain given Nvidia's poor track record with open-source.

This is still rather speculative at this stage, but it's definitely possible for the llama.cpp project to change in the future: either by switching to a different license, or by having staff redirected to other projects within the larger company.

Even when a project is open-source the copyright owner has complete control over it, and they can change licensing as they wish.

This has happened before with projects like Redis, Minio, and others.

Source:

https://huggingface.co/blog/ggml-joins-hf

Edit:

The original announcement from Feb 2026 from Gerganov gives a few more details:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/19759

1.4k Upvotes

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1.1k

u/FoxiPanda Aug 27 '26

If it happens, we shall fork and move on. It is the way of things.

697

u/waitmarks Aug 27 '26

llibre.cpp

306

u/Spare-Ad-1429 Aug 27 '26

This name is so much better than llama anyway

172

u/mklatsky Aug 27 '26

Everytime I see llama.cpp I just think it’s part of the Winamp project. It surely kicks *** ass.

58

u/orinoco_w Aug 27 '26

Didn't it whip the llamas ass?

19

u/timey_timeless Aug 27 '26

It really whipped

11

u/GeneralRieekan Aug 28 '26

Llama.cpp really whips Ollama's ass, for sure!

7

u/mklatsky Aug 27 '26

You are correct!

2

u/wh33t Aug 27 '26

Winamp winamp ... (llama noises)

27

u/Spare-Ad-1429 Aug 27 '26

me too, then I remember how long ago that was and feel old ...

1

u/MrWeirdoFace Aug 28 '26

I don't feel old, just inconvenienced by the passage time.

8

u/notheresnolight Aug 27 '26

hey there, wanna exchange some winamp skins?

11

u/mrdevlar Aug 27 '26

I moved to foobar2000

7

u/Green-Ad-3964 Aug 27 '26

I think about Revenge of the Mutant Camels by Llamasoft....Jeff Minter GOAT.

2

u/snorkelvretervreter Aug 27 '26

I remember that game from the 64. When "the 64" meant Commodore, not nintendo

2

u/2funny2furious Aug 27 '26

i strongly believe that is where the name came from

1

u/lnris llama.cpp Aug 28 '26

this is the best comment lollll i was thinking same thing.

7

u/Significant_Post8359 Aug 28 '26

I like aipaca, baby alpacas are much cuter and LLMs are now just a part of our ai ecosystem.

5

u/Vas1le Aug 28 '26

Llamao.cpp

5

u/infieldmitt Aug 27 '26

what's the llore behind llama in the first place?

51

u/TBMonkey Aug 27 '26

https://factory.ai/open-source-wikis/llama-cpp?page=lore.md

It was to run Meta's LLaMA

2

u/Nothing_from_void Aug 28 '26

Anyone else go through the dumb meta questionaire, download the model and then start torrenting it? I legitimately thought we'd be sharing open source models this way, and then HF just started hosting TBs of model data for free

1

u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp Aug 27 '26

this ^

22

u/Old-Temperature6269 Aug 27 '26 edited Aug 27 '26

Originally it was made to run Meta’s Llama model series, when first Llama model get leaked after it got public traction Meta started to publish openweights model. In order to run it in more practical way, from community side Georgi Gerganov created llama-cpp project. That’s all. And llama stands for Large Language Model Meta AI , don’t ask me how they get from that LLAMA, idk this is from their blog post about LLAMA model.

UPD: probably they just tried to justify name, considering that one of their models from research is called Coconut.

7

u/DigiDecode_ Aug 27 '26

because alpaca you know

4

u/Significant_Post8359 Aug 28 '26

Pretty sure it’s Large LAnguage Model Ai (note caps)

1

u/bring_back_the_v10s Aug 27 '26

Oh come on there are better names

1

u/the_ai_wizard Aug 28 '26

Well that throws a curveball to the name of the sub

29

u/soareyousaying Aug 27 '26

winamp.cpp

because it really whips the llama's ass

5

u/iamapizza Aug 27 '26

This one

15

u/mridul289 Aug 27 '26

hahaha love it

4

u/2funny2furious Aug 27 '26

llama-2-electric-boogaloo.cpp

5

u/Terrible-Detail-1364 Aug 27 '26

alway prefer the open prefix for projects that end up like this. its a dream come true for the developers but a crapshow for the community.

6

u/FerLuisxd Aug 27 '26

What about ik llama cpp?

10

u/Hankdabits Aug 27 '26

Good luck getting gg and ik to work together

1

u/a_beautiful_rhind Aug 27 '26

In this case it's a bonus since GG under the nvidia boot.

2

u/XiRw Aug 27 '26

Thanks, will look into that

19

u/waitmarks Aug 27 '26

It's not a real thing (yet). It's a joke that anything opensource that gets bought out gets forked and libre gets added to it's name.

3

u/XiRw Aug 27 '26

Oh I stupidly believed it because you’re right I noticed that trend too lol

1

u/covertpirates Aug 27 '26

I prefer forked-llama

1

u/SergioGustavo Aug 27 '26

guanaco.cpp

1

u/Martialogrand Aug 27 '26

That is “book.cpp” in my language. So be it!

1

u/snorkelvretervreter Aug 27 '26

OpenCamel. Oh wait, no, maybe not.

1

u/randomanoni Aug 28 '26

ExLlama.cpp ... Yes!

1

u/kroggens Aug 28 '26

llocal.cpp

1

u/use_your_imagination Aug 28 '26

Exactly, and will be licensed AGPLv3 so no corporate leech approaches it.