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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?

#121
post #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.

Hey thanks, I didn't know about cortex and this looks perfect.

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

#122
post #102

ollama was good initially in that it made LLMs more accessible for non-technical people while everyone was figuring things out. Lately they seem to be contributing mostly confusion to the conversation. The #1 model the entire world is talking about is literally mislabeled their side. There is no such thing as R1-1.5b. Quantization without telling users also confuses noobs as to what is possible. Setting up an api dif…

What do you mean there is no such thing as R1-1.5b? DeepSeek released a distilled version based on a 1.5B Qwen model with the full name DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B, see chapter 3.2 on page 14 of their research article [0].

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.12948

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

#123
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is great, I did not know about RamaLama and I'll be using and recommending that in future and if I see people using Ollama in instructions I'll recommend they move to RamaLama in the future. Cheers.

This is fascinating. I’ve been using ollama with no knowledge of this because it just works without a ton of knobs I don’t feel like spending the time to mess with. As usual, the real work seems to be appropriated by people who do the last little bit — put an acceptable user experience and some polish on it — and they take all the money and credit. It’s shitty but it also happens because the vast majority of devs, es…

The problem is that whatever esoteric motivations technical people have to join the FOSS movement (scratching an itch, seeking fame, saving the world, doing what everybody else is doing etc.), does not translate well to the domain of designing user experiences. People with the education and talent to have an impact here have neither incentives nor practical means to "FOSS-it". You could Creative Commons some artwork (and there are beautiful examples) but thats about it. The art and science of making software usable thus remains a proprietary pursuit. Indeed if that bottleneck could somehow be relaxed, adoption of FOSS software would skyrocket because the technical core is so good and keeps getting better.

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

#124
post #115

So many here are trashing on Ollama, saying it's "just" nice porcelain around llama.cpp and it's not doing anything complicated. Okay. Let's stipulate that. So where's the non-sketchy, non-for-profit equivalent? Where's the nice frontend for llama.cpp that makes it trivial for anyone who wants to play around with local LLMs without having to know much about their internals? If Ollama isn't doing anything difficult, w…

supporting vulkan will help ollama reach the masses who don't have dedicated gpus from nvidia. this is such a low hanging fruit that it's silly how they are acting.

As has been pointed out in this thread in a comment that you replied to (so I know you saw it) [0], Ollama goes to a lot of contortions to support multiple llama.cpp backends. Yes, their solution is a bit of a hack, but it means that the effort to adding a new back end is substantial.

And again, they're doing those contortions to make it easy for people. Making it easy involves trade-offs.

Yes, Ollama has flaws. They could communicate better about why they're ignoring PRs. All I'm saying is let's not pretend they're not doing anything complicated or difficult when no one has been able to recreate what they're doing.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42886933

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

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most recent one of the top of my head is their horrendous aliasing of DeepSeek R1 on their model hub, misleading users into thinking they are running the full model but really anything but the 671b alias is one of the distilled models. This has already led to lots of people claiming that they are running R1 locally when they are not.

I'm not sure that's fair, given that the distilled models are almost as good. Do you really think Deepseek's web interface is giving you access to 671b? They're going to be running distilled models there too.

Given that the 671B model is reportedly MoE-based, it definitely could be powering the web interface and API. MoE slashes the per-inference compute cost - and when serving the model for multiple users you only have to host a single copy of the model params in memory, so the bulk doesn't hurt you as much.

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

#126
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?

Ollama - `brew install ollama` llama.cpp - Read the docs, with loads of information and unclear use cases. Question if it has API compatibility and secondary features that a bunch of tools expect. Decide it's not worth your effort when `ollama` is already running by the time you've read the docs

Additionally, Ollama makes model installation a single command. With llama.cpp, you have to download the raw models from Huggingface and handle storage for them yourself.

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

#127
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fully open source. I mean yes it uses llama.cpp without giving it credit. But why run it in a VM?

Isn't there a clause in MIT that says you're required to give credit? Also, I didn't know a YC company which started it: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ollama .

The project existed in the open source and then subsequently the creators sought funding to work on it full time.

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

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This framing feels a bit like the “Dropbox won’t succeed because rsync is easy” thinking. No this isn't. There are plenty of end user GUI apps that make it far easier than Ollama to download and run local LLMs (disclaimer: I build one of them). That's an entirely different market. IMO, the intersection between the set of people who use a command line tool, and the set of people who are incapable of running `brew in…

I can't install any .app on my fairly locked down work computer, but I can `brew install ollama`. When I read the llama.cpp repo and see I have to build it, vs ollama where I just have to get it, the choice is already made. I just want something I can quickly run and use with aider or mess around with. When I need to do real work I just use whatever OpenAI model we have running on Azure PTUs

> I can `brew install ollama`.

Can you `brew install llama.cpp`?

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

#129
post #105
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's fully open source. I mean yes it uses llama.cpp without giving it credit. But why run it in a VM?

> But why run it in a VM? Because you don't execute untrusted code in your machine without containerization/virtualization. Don't you?

The question was asking why it’s untrusted code, not why you run untrusted code in a VM.

There are a lot of open-source tools that we have to trust to get anything done on a daily basis.

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

#130
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

supporting vulkan will help ollama reach the masses who don't have dedicated gpus from nvidia. this is such a low hanging fruit that it's silly how they are acting.

As has been pointed out in this thread in a comment that you replied to (so I know you saw it) [0], Ollama goes to a lot of contortions to support multiple llama.cpp backends. Yes, their solution is a bit of a hack, but it means that the effort to adding a new back end is substantial. And again, they're doing those contortions to make it easy for people. Making it easy involves trade-offs. Yes, Ollama has flaws. They…

This is incorrect. The effort it took to enable Vulkan was relatively minor. The PR is short and to be honest it doesn't do much, because it doesn't need to.
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