Live data from Hacker News

Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

ollama.com

161–170 of 384 posts

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#161
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yep, having a "stupid" central model with multiple tools is IMO the key to efficient agentic systems. That doesn't fix the "you don't know what you don't know" problem which is huge with smaller models. A bigger model with more world knowledge really is a lot smarter in practice, though at a huge cost in efficiency.

Ive always wondered where the inflection point lies between on the one hand trying to train the model on all kinds of data such as Wikipedia/encyclopedia, versus in the system prompt pointing to your local versions of those data sources, perhaps even through a search like api/tool. Is there already some research or experimentation done into this area?

The training gives you a very lossy version of the original data (the smaller the model, the lossier it is; very small models will ultimately output gibberish and word salad that only loosely makes some sort of sense) but it's the right format for generalization. So you actually want both, they're highly complementary.

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#162

Why are people still using Ollama? Serious. Lemonade or even llama.cpp are much better optimised and arguably just as easy to use.

Serious answer: I don't use it that much, it's what I happened to download like 1.5 years ago, and it works fine. Happy to see what may be a speed boost, and have little interest in switching to something else (unless my situation changes, of course).

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#163

LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.

I disagree with every sentence of this. > solves the problem of too much demand for inference False, it creates consumer demand for inference chips, which will be badly utilised. > also would use less electricity What makes you think that? (MAYBE you can save power on cooling. But not if the data center is close to a natural heat sink) > It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. The performance limit…

[deleted]

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#164

LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.

I disagree with every sentence of this. > solves the problem of too much demand for inference False, it creates consumer demand for inference chips, which will be badly utilised. > also would use less electricity What makes you think that? (MAYBE you can save power on cooling. But not if the data center is close to a natural heat sink) > It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. The performance limit…

> What makes you think that?

Looking at actual users of LLMs

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#165
I have an M4 Max with 48GB RAM. Anyone have any tips for good local models? Context length? Using the model recommended in the blog post (qwen3.5:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4) with Ollama 0.19.0 and it can take anywhere between 6-25 seconds for a response (after lots of thinking) from me asking "Hello world". Is this the best that's currently achievable with my hardware or is there something that can be configured to get better results?

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#166
post #165

I have an M4 Max with 48GB RAM. Anyone have any tips for good local models? Context length? Using the model recommended in the blog post (qwen3.5:35b-a3b-coding-nvfp4) with Ollama 0.19.0 and it can take anywhere between 6-25 seconds for a response (after lots of thinking) from me asking "Hello world". Is this the best that's currently achievable with my hardware or is there something that can be configured to get bet…

> it can take anywhere between 6-25 seconds for a response (after lots of thinking) from me asking "Hello world".

That's not an unsurprising result given the pretty ambiguous query, hence all the thinking. Asking "write a simple hello world program in python3" results in a much faster response for me (m4 base w/ 24gb, using qwen3.6:9b).

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#167

LLMs on device is the future. It's more secure and solves the problem of too much demand for inference compared to data center supply, it also would use less electricity. It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. Most users don't need frontier model performance.

I disagree with every sentence of this. > solves the problem of too much demand for inference False, it creates consumer demand for inference chips, which will be badly utilised. > also would use less electricity What makes you think that? (MAYBE you can save power on cooling. But not if the data center is close to a natural heat sink) > It's just a matter of getting the performance good enough. The performance limit…

> What makes you think that?

The fact that today's and yesterday's models are quite capable of handling mundane tasks, and even companies behind frontier models are investing heavily in strategies to manage context instead of blindly plowing through problems with brute-force generalist models.

But let's flip this around: what on earth even suggests to you that most users need frontier models?

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#169
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive always wondered where the inflection point lies between on the one hand trying to train the model on all kinds of data such as Wikipedia/encyclopedia, versus in the system prompt pointing to your local versions of those data sources, perhaps even through a search like api/tool. Is there already some research or experimentation done into this area?

The training gives you a very lossy version of the original data (the smaller the model, the lossier it is; very small models will ultimately output gibberish and word salad that only loosely makes some sort of sense) but it's the right format for generalization. So you actually want both, they're highly complementary.

[dead]

Re: Ollama is now powered by MLX on Apple Silicon in preview

#170
post #129
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's odd no manufacturer jumped on this wagon to offer a competitive alternative.

Is there even enough market for this? These models are dumber and slower than API SoTA models and will always be. My time and sanity is much more expensive than insurance against any risk of sending my garbage code to companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars. For most, it's a downgrade to use local models in multiple fronts: total cost of ownership, software maintenance, electricity bill, losing performance on…

Actually yes. For example, I run local models for ingested documents, summaries, etc. The local models are fine, and there is no need for me to pay for tokens. Performance is adequate for that purpose as well. There are many other cases where I run at scale, time is flexible so things can move slower, and I rather keep it all in house. I'm not even getting into areas where data cannot leave the premises for legal reasons. Right now I'm limited with GPUs mostly. But if that world of local models on Apple silicon is so "good", there is room to expand it to other fruits...
Post reply on HN