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Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

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Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#21
post #8

This is going to sound like a troll, but it's an honest question: Why do people use Ollama over llama.cpp? llama.cpp has added a ton of features, is about as user-friendly as Ollama, and is higher-performance. Is there some key differentiator for Ollama that I'm missing?

Honestly I just didn't know it was this easy to use, maybe because of the name... But ramalama seems to be a full replacement for ollama

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#22
post #8

This is going to sound like a troll, but it's an honest question: Why do people use Ollama over llama.cpp? llama.cpp has added a ton of features, is about as user-friendly as Ollama, and is higher-performance. Is there some key differentiator for Ollama that I'm missing?

I used both. I had a terrible time with llama, and did not realise it until I used ollama.

I owned an RTX2070, and followed the llama instructions to make sure it was compiling with GPU enabled. I then hand-tweaked settings (numgpulayers) to try to make it offload as much as possible to the GPU. I verified that it was using a good chunk of my GPU ram (via nvidia-smi), and confirmed that with-gpu was faster than cpu-only. It was still pretty slow, and influenced my decision to upgrade to an RTX3070. It was faster, but still pretty meh...

The first time I used ollama, everything just worked straight out of the box, with one command and zero configuration. It was lightning fast. Honestly if I'd had ollama earlier, I probably wouldn't have felt the need to upgrade GPU.

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#23

Ollama needs competition. I’m not sure what drives the people that maintain it but some of their actions imply that there are ulterior motives at play that do not have the benefit of their users in mind. However such projects require a lot of time and effort and it’s not clear if this project can be forked and kept alive.

There is https://cortex.so/ that I’m looking forward too.

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#24

Ollama needs competition. I’m not sure what drives the people that maintain it but some of their actions imply that there are ulterior motives at play that do not have the benefit of their users in mind. However such projects require a lot of time and effort and it’s not clear if this project can be forked and kept alive.

Can you please explain why you think they may be operating in bad faith?

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#26
post #9
post #8

This is going to sound like a troll, but it's an honest question: Why do people use Ollama over llama.cpp? llama.cpp has added a ton of features, is about as user-friendly as Ollama, and is higher-performance. Is there some key differentiator for Ollama that I'm missing?

For starters: - It doesn't have a website - It doesn't have a download page, you have to build it yourself

> - It doesn't have a download page, you have to build it yourself

I'd wager that anyone capable enough to run a command line tool like Ollama should also be able to download prebuilt binaries from the llama.cpp releases page[1]. Also, prebuilt binaries are available on things like homebrew[2].

[1]: https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/releases

[2]: https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/llama.cpp

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#27
post #18

Can someone explain what the point of ollama is? Every time I look at it, it seems like it's a worse llama.cpp that removes options to make things "easier".

It’s to make things easier for casual users.

With ollama I type brew install ollama and then ollama get something, and I have it already running. With llama.ccp it’s seems i have to build it first, then manually download models somewhere - this is an instant turnoff, i maybe have 5 minutes of my life to waste on this

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#28
post #11

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.

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#29
Ollama is sketchy enough that I run it in a VM. Which is odd because it would probably take less effort to just run Llama.cpp directly, but VMs are pretty easy so just went that route.

When I see people bring up the sketchiness most of the time the creator responds with the equivalent of shrugs, which imo increases the sketchiness.

Re: Llama.cpp supports Vulkan. why doesn't Ollama?

#30
post #8

This is going to sound like a troll, but it's an honest question: Why do people use Ollama over llama.cpp? llama.cpp has added a ton of features, is about as user-friendly as Ollama, and is higher-performance. Is there some key differentiator for Ollama that I'm missing?

I can only speak for myself but to me llama.ccp looks kind of hard to use (tbh never tried to use it), whereas ollama was just one cli command away. Also I had no idea that its equivalent, I thought llama.ccp is some experimental tool for hardcore llm cracks, not something that I can teach my for example my non-technical mom to use. Looking at the repo of llama.ccp it’s still not obvious to me how to use it without d…

In my mind, it doesn't help that llama.cpp's name is that of a source file. Intuitively, that name screams "library for further integration," not "tool for end-user use."
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