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Ollama's new app

ollama.com

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Re: Ollama's new app

#151

Post by jillesvangurp »

ekianjo wrote: post #138

completely useless move. there are already tons of good clients for Ollama. The Ollama devs need to focus on being a better llama.cpp, not building clients.

Ollama is a VC funded company that ultimately needs a revenue model they serve investors, not open source developers. Llama.cpp is a means to an end to them, not the goal. It's hard to monetize open source libraries. But a good chat client might lead to paying enterprise users.

Running good enough models locally is appealing to a lot of people and kind of hard if you are not a developer. If you are it's easy (been there done that). That's the core premise of the company. Their tech is of course widely used and for a while they've been focusing just on getting it to that stage. But that's never going to add up to revenue. So, they need to productize what they have.

This looks like a potentially viable way.

Re: Ollama's new app

#152

Post by tux1968 »

jart wrote: post #136
coder543 wrote: post #95

I am somewhat surprised that this app doesn't seem to offer any way to connect to a remote Ollama instance. The most powerful computer I own isn't necessarily the one I'm running the GUI on.

This. This. A thousand times this. I hate Windows / MacOS but love their desktops. I love Linux / BSD but hate their desktops. So my most expensive most powerful workstation is always a headless Linux machine that I ssh into from a Windows or MacOS toy computer. Unfortunately most developers do not understand this. Every time I run a command in the terminal and it tries to open a browser tab without printing the URL,…

You can replace the xdg-open command (or whichever command is used on your linux system) with your own. Just program it to fire over the url to a waiting socket on your windows box, and have it automatically open there. The details are pretty easy to work out, and the result will be seamless.

Re: Ollama's new app

#153

Post by longnguyen »

Congrats on the launch, Ollama team.

Shameless plug: I’ve been building a native AI chat client called BoltAI[0] for the last 3 years. It’s native, feature-rich, and supports multiple AI services, including Ollama and LM Studio.

Give it a try.

[0]: https://boltai.com

Re: Ollama's new app

#154

Post by ethan_smith »

coder543 wrote: post #95

I am somewhat surprised that this app doesn't seem to offer any way to connect to a remote Ollama instance. The most powerful computer I own isn't necessarily the one I'm running the GUI on.

You can work around this by using SSH port forwarding (ssh -L 11434:localhost:11434 user@remote) to connect to a remote Ollama instance, though native support would definitely be better.

Re: Ollama's new app

#155

Post by Agentlien »

AnonC wrote: post #116
pentagrama wrote: post #44

Looks like a big pivot on target audience from developers to regular users, at least on the homepage https://ollama.com/ as a product. Before, it was all about the CLI versions of Ollama for devs, now it's not even mentioned. At the bottom of the blog post it says: > For pure CLI versions of Ollama, standalone downloads are available on Ollama’s GitHub releases page. Nothing against that, just an observation. Previou…

I’d heard of Msty and briefly tried it before. I checked the website again and it looks quite feature rich. I hadn’t known about LM Studio, and I see that it allows commercial use for free (which Matt doesn’t). How would you compare and contrast between the two? My main use would be to use it as a tool with a chat interface rather than developing applications that talk to models.

I use Msty all the time and I love it. It just works and it's got all features I want now, including generating alternate responses, swapping models mid-chat, editing both sent messages and responses, ...

I also tried LM Studio a few months back. The interface felt overly complex and I got weird error messages which made it look like I'd have to manually fix errors in the underlying python environment. Would have been fine if it was for work, but I just wanted to play around with LLMs in my spare time so I couldn't be bothered.

Re: Ollama's new app

#156

Post by [deleted] »

nileshtrivedi wrote: post #126
mchiang wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

one of the maintainers for Ollama. I don't see it as a pivot. We are all developers ourselves, and we use it. In fact, there are many self-made prototypes before this from different individuals. We were hooked, so we built it for ourselves. Ollama is made for developers, and our focus in continually improving Ollama's capabilities.

Question since you are here, how long before tool-calling is enabled for Gemma3 models?

[deleted]

Re: Ollama's new app

#157

Post by LudwigNagasena »

mchiang wrote: post #54
pentagrama wrote: post #44

Looks like a big pivot on target audience from developers to regular users, at least on the homepage https://ollama.com/ as a product. Before, it was all about the CLI versions of Ollama for devs, now it's not even mentioned. At the bottom of the blog post it says: > For pure CLI versions of Ollama, standalone downloads are available on Ollama’s GitHub releases page. Nothing against that, just an observation. Previou…

one of the maintainers for Ollama. I don't see it as a pivot. We are all developers ourselves, and we use it. In fact, there are many self-made prototypes before this from different individuals. We were hooked, so we built it for ourselves. Ollama is made for developers, and our focus in continually improving Ollama's capabilities.

Are there any plans to improve observability toolset for developers? There is myriad of various AI chat apps, and there is no clear reason why another one from Ollama would be better. But Ollama is uniquely positioned to provide the best observability experience to its users because it owns the whole server stack, any other observability tool (eg Langfuse) may only treat it as a yet another API black box.

Re: Ollama's new app

#160

Post by jart »

stavros wrote: post #139
jart wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people aren't hackers. Thanks to LLMs and vibe coding, even they can now take a can-do attitude to life that feels empowering. There's no longer any excuse to languish in helpless misery and negativity. You can just build things.

But you can build something new instead of reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time.

I've only been lucky enough to find one opportunity in my entire twenty-seven year career to write something novel and new. Most of the time we're reinventing the wheel. What separates the winners from the losers is whether or not it's your wheel.
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