alt Hacker NewsOllama: All Aboard Open Models
Comments
Will Ollama finally properly credit llama.cpp ? Or will they continue to rebrand new llama.cpp features as their own?
To any ollama.com dudes and dudettes reading this: why won't you offer any embedding models on your subscription when they are readily supported by the software and fairly efficient to run?
I think the "8.9 million developers use ollama" figure they throw around is contrived. I found this 2025 article which posits that there were 47.2 million software developers in the world. Even the number of developers has doubled in a year (plausible if you account for the rise in vibe coding), I think it's very unlikely that 1 in 10 developers use ollama.
https://www.slashdata.co/post/global-developer-population-tr...
>Today, we’re announcing that Ollama has raised money from VCs...
Note to self, Enshittification ahead. Don't use any ollama services unless it's calling an industry standard api.
Cool to learn that the founders also had a hand in developing Docker Desktop in the past!
How did they raise that amount of money if they are so hated, I see only bad comments everywhere about ollama. Not a fan of them myself, but they played a good part in local ai since the beginning. The investors screw everything: Ollama announced an $88 million financing on July 9, 2026. The named participants were:
Investment firms and organizations
Benchmark — represented by Peter Fenton Theory Ventures — Tomasz Tunguz 8VC — Alex Kolicich Y Combinator Garage Capital Pace Capital 49 Palms GTMFund
Individual investors
Solomon Hykes — Docker founder Aaron Katz — ClickHouse CEO Spencer Kimball — Cockroach Labs co-founder and GIMP co-creator Quinn Slack — Amp CEO Marianna Tessel — Cisco board member Michael Montano — former Twitter head of engineering Other unnamed angel investors >like lmstudio and google/alphabet maybe!
Investors are not free
Another chance to tip their hat to llama.cpp, missed. I really don't get it.
Annoyingly many useful tools like the "Page Assist" browser extension or "Murmure" are plug-and-play only with Ollama...
> The personal computer moment for AI
Georgi Gerganov, the author of llama.cpp, is the real hero here.
This is all lovely and I wish them the best.
But please don't use ollama, or their quants. Not only is the app itself slower than pure llamacpp. But their quants are often no where near the best.
I really hope people start with something like unsloth, as their software and quants are really much better all around.
[flagged]
Do not use Ollama.
The VCs listed in the article aren’t the dumbest ones around. Why on earth would they invest in a shell around the actual technology?
Were they so enraptured with the “docker for LLMs” line?
> The local LLM ecosystem doesn’t need Ollama. It needs llama.cpp. The rest is packaging, and better packaging already exists.
Then put those LLMs to work and build an open source alternative to everything that Ollama is doing.
After all, open source is a pricing weapon to race everything to $0.
I get that people here have reasons to hate on Ollama but it has two genuinely strong points: - it makes it very easy to use open models with a lot of harnesses and assistants via `ollama launch`; Their $20 subscription is very generous, and they claim not to log or train on your data.
I will be curious to see if their subscription ever supports the ~3T open weights models announced this week.
https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/11772
A year and still no implementation for such a basic need as offloading MoE layers onto the CPU selectively. On llama.cpp I can get models like Qwen 35BA3B running partially on gpu/cpu with 40t/s on a laptop thanks to --n-cpu-moe but on this VC funded joke it would be simply unusable. I can't quite understand how you make a wrapper so much worse than the code you're ripping out.
>This funding is fuel for what’s ahead. Ollama sits front and center in the open model ecosystem
No.