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Ollama's new app
- technick 1y agoI tried Ollama once but immediately removed it, when I couldn't easily install models that are outside of the models they "support". LM Studio is by far the best tool out there in my humble opinion.
- jalalx 1y agoI wish the UI was also open sourced
- rasengan0 1y agoEnjoy Ollama CLI so the output can be redirected or piped; definitely a useful feature.
- rihegher 1y ago"Ollama’s new app is now available for macOS and Windows" linux sounds out for now
- amelius 1y agoShouldn't the LLM be able to code the linux version?
- permalac 1y agoVibe coding?
- SchemaLoad 1y agoNever ask an AI hype bro why after years of coding agents and 10x productivity, software is just as shit as it always has been.
- dwaaa 1y agono, this is a scam
- pkaye 1y agoClick the download button and you will see Linux as an option.
- mchiang 1y agoLinux does not have the interface right now, and there are a lot of options for users. Open WebUI is an awesome project. https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui
- 8thcross 1y agoa little too late i think.
- thimabi 1y agoIt came very late indeed! By now, I’m already used to LM Studio as a UI for local LLMs… it even seems to have more features than ollama. But I liked to know that ollama developed a GUI as well — more options is always better, and maybe it will improve in the future.
- behnamoh 1y agonot too late for VC money-grab tho. Edit: I hope I'm wrong about this. Thanks for clarifying.
- mchiang 1y agoBen, we've had private conversations about this previously. I don't see any VC money grab nor am I aware of any. Building a product that we've dreamed of building is not wrong. Making money does not need to be evil. I, and the folks who worked tirelessly to make Ollama better will continue to build our dreams.
- kanestreet 1y agoI mean you’re a YC backed startup soo it’s not like it’s out of the question lol
- IceWreck 1y agoWhy not Linux? The UI looks to be some kind chrome based thingy - probably electron - should be easy to port to Linux. Also is there a link to the source?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- johncolanduoni 1y agoFor all of Electron's promise in being cross-platform, "I'll just press this button and ship this Electron app on Linux and everything will be fine" is not the current state of things. A lot of it is papercuts like glibc version aggravation, but GPU support is persistently problematic.
- zettabomb 1y agoThe Element app on Linux is currently broken (if you want to use encryption, so basically for everyone) due to an issue with Electron. Luckily it still works in a regular browser. I'm really baffled by how that can happen.
- ceroxylon 1y agoI am guessing that the Linux version was first (or the announcement was worded strangely), as it is available on their download page: https://ollama.com/download https://ollama.com/download
- DarkmSparks 1y agothats just the cli versions. this app got gui.
- ceroxylon 1y agoAh, I missed that detail, thank you for clarifying.
- nicce 1y ago
- swyx 1y agofinally, what took so long lmao if im being honest i care more about multiple local ai apps on my desktop all hooking into the same ollama instance rather than all downloading their own models as part of the app so i have like multiple 10s of gbs of repeated weights all over the place because apps dont talk to each other what does it take for THAT to finally happen
- noman-land 1y agoI, too, dream of this.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- mchiang 1y agothis is something we are working on. I don't have a specific timeline since it's done when its done, but it is being worked on.
- paxys 1y agoThat's already possible via the ollama API. It's up to applications themselves to support it (and plenty do).
- washadjeffmad 1y agosymlinks
- dizhn 1y agoI haven't used a local model in a while but ollama was the only one I've seen convert models into a different format. (I think for reduplication). You should be able to say download a gguf file and point a bunch of frontends to that same file.
- dcreater 1y agoAnd this move by Ollama is going exactly in the wrong direction. Its finally the push I need to move away. I predict ollama will only get worse from here on.
- syspec 1y agoI've been using Open WebUI and have been blown away, it's a better ChatGPT interface than ChatGPT! https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui https://github.com/open-webui/open-webui Curious how this compares to that, which has a ton of features and runs great
- mindcrime 1y agoLikewise. I use Ollama as the API server and CLI interface for local models, and use OpenWebUI when I want a web interface (which TBH, isn't that often) and it's a fine combination. Honestly, the idea of Ollama adding their own chat interface UI never even occurred to me. It feels a little bit... unnecessary? Still choices are good, to props to the Ollama team!
- apitman 1y agoIs the Open WebUI license still OSI-compatible? I saw some drama about this on reddit but I'm not sure about the current state. https://docs.openwebui.com/license/ https://docs.openwebui.com/license/
- BeefySwain 1y agoNo it's not
- wkat4242 1y agoI don't really care about that as a user. Maybe for FOSS purists it's important but copyright is a thing I as techy care nothing about. I can it for free and i can see all the source code. I'm not going to build a fork so the rest doesn't matter.
- benatkin 1y agoIt's a phony BSD license, with an attempt to pass it off as the real thing with some verbiage. It's neither within the letter nor the spirit of the real BSD license.
- siggalucci 1y agoThat’s what I came to say. I made a tool for my Mac where I can highlight any text then set a hotkey to use that text in a query to an LLM. Nice because it works on any text. Browser, IDE, email etc.
- ashirviskas 1y agoAnd why should anyone use it or ollama itself?
- dpkirchner 1y agoollama is probably the easiest tool to use if you want to experiment with LLMs locally.
- yjftsjthsd-h 1y agoThat or llamafile, depending on details.
- ProllyInfamous 1y agoI literally just turned a fifteen year old MacPro5,1 into an Ollama terminal, using an ancient AMD VEGA56 GPU running Ubuntu 22... and it actually responds faster than I can type (which surprised me considering the age of this machine). No former Linux experience, beyond basic Mac OS Terminal commands. Surprisingly simple setup... and I used an online LLM to hold my hand as we walked through the installation / setup. If I wanted to call the CLI, I'd have to ask an online LLM what that code even is (something something ollama3.2). >ollama is probably the easiest tool ... to experiment with LLMs locally. Seems quite simple so far. If I can do it (blue collar electrician with no programming experience) than so can you.
- redacted 1y agoNo one should use ollama. A cursory search of r/localllama gives plenty of occassions where they've proven themselves bad actors. Here's a 'fun' overview https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kg20mu/so_why_are_we_shing_on_ollama_again/ https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1kg20mu/so_why_... There are multiple (far better) options - eg LM studio if you want GUI, llama.cpp if you want the CLI that ollama ripped off. IMO the only reason ollama is even in the conversation is it was easy to get running on macOS, allowing the SV MBP set to feel included
- llllm 1y ago
- jonahbenton 1y agoBoo. Dumb. Own the local backend. So much more to do there. Trying to match the even larger local front end ecosystem is just a waste of energy.
- 1dom 1y agoI'm sad this post is greyed out. I think it's a fair take. Other critical takes say the same thing, but wrapped in far more variations of: "definitely not judging/criticising/being negative, but I don't like this." This is clearly a new direction for Ollama, but I can't find anything at the link explaining or justifying why they're doing it, and that makes me uncomfortable as an existing regular Ollama user. I think this move does deserves firmer feedback like yours.
- mococa 1y agoNative or another electron crap?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nguyenkien 1y agoIt's use system webview.
- Retr0id 1y agoOff-topic I suppose but the llama artwork looks quite good, and stylistically consistent between pieces. I wonder if it was done by a human artist or if generative models are just that good now.
- ladberg 1y agoI can't comment on whether these particular pieces were generated, but models are certainly good enough now to handle these cases and more
- Retr0id 1y agoUntil now I've been able to reliably distinguish generated artwork from human authored artwork with ~90% accuracy. Of course, it's always getting better, but my initial research tells me the main logo has existed since Jan 2024: https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/2152 https://github.com/ollama/ollama/issues/2152 I don't think it was generated. (on the basis that this can't be some cutting-edge new model whose output I haven't seen yet)
- mchiang 1y agoOne of the maintainers. The logo and all the illustrations are done by a human artist.
- uyzstvqs 1y agoThere's also Jan AI, which supports Linux, MCP, any Vulkan GPU, any Llama.cpp-compatible model, and optionally multiple cloud models as well. That seems like a better solution than this.
- mchiang 1y agoChoice is good but here is why prefer Ollama over others (I'm biased because I work on Ollama). Supporting multiple backends is HARD. Originally, we thought we'd just add multiple backends to Ollama - MLX, ROCm, TRT-LLM, etc. It sounds really good on paper. In practice, you get into the lowest common denominator effect. What happens when you want to release Model A together with the model creator, and backend B doesn't support it? Do you ship partial support? If you do, then you start breaking your own product experience. Supporting Vulkan for backwards compatibility on some hardware seems simple right? What if I told you in our testing, there is a portion of the supported hardware matrix getting -20% decrease in performance. What about just cherry picking which hardware to use Vulkan vs ROCm vs CUDA, etc? Do you start managing a long and tedious support matrix, where each time a driver is updated, the support may shift? Supporting flash attention sounds simple too right? What if I told you over 20% of the hardware and for specific models, enabling it will cause non-trivial amount errors pertaining to specific hardware/model combinations? We are almost in a spot, where we can selectively enable flash attention per type of model architecture and hardware architecture. It's so easy to add features, and hard to say no, but given any day, I will stand for a better overall product experience (at least to me since it's very subjective). No is temporary and yes is forever. Ollama focuses on running the model the way the model creators intended. I know we get a lot of negativity on naming but often times, it's what we work with the model creators on naming (which surprisingly may or may not be how another platform named it on release). Overtime, I think this means more focus on top models to optimize more and add capabilities to augment the models.
- Eisenstein 1y agoSure, those are all difficult problems. Problems that single devs are dealing with every day and figuring out. Why is it so hard for Ollama? What seems to be true is that Ollama wants to be a solution that drives the narrative and wants to choose for its users rather than with them. It uses a proprietary model library, it built itself on llama.cpp and didn't upstream its changes, it converted the standard gguf model weights into some unusable file type that only worked with itself, etc. Sorry but I don't buy it. These are not intractable problems to deal with. These are excuses by former docker creators looking to destroy another ecosystem by attempting to coopt it for their own gain.
- apitman 1y agoI've been on something of a quest to find a really good chat interface for LLMs. Most import feature for me is that I want to be able to chat with local models, remote models on my other machines, and cloud models (OpenAI API compatible). Anything that makes it easier to switch between models or query them simultaneously is important. Here's what I've learned so far: * Msty - my current favorite. Can do true simultaneous requests to multiple models. Nice aesthetic. Sadly not open source. Have had some freezing issues on Linux. * Jan.ai - Can't make requests to multiple models simultaneously * LM Studio - Not open source. Doesn't support remote/cloud models (maybe there's a plugin?) * GPT4All - Was getting weird JSON errors with openrouter models. Have to explicitly switch between models, even if you're trying to use them from different chats. Still to try: Librechat, Open WebUI, AnythingLLM, koboldcpp. Would love to hear any other suggestions.
- khimaros 1y agoCherryStudio is a power tool for this case https://github.com/CherryHQ/cherry-studio https://github.com/CherryHQ/cherry-studio -- has MCP, search, personas, and reasoning support too. i use it heavily with llama.cpp + llama-swap
- Eisenstein 1y agoHave fun on their Issues page if you don't read and write Chinese. Documentation pages are written in Chinese as well.
- tpae 1y agoI've been building this: https://dinoki.ai/ https://dinoki.ai/ Works fully local, privacy first, and it's a native app (Swift for macOS, WPF for Windows)
- onprema 1y agothis looks so cool! :)
- 1y ago
- rkwz 1y ago[Shameless Plug] I built my own Ollama macOS app written in SwiftUI: https://github.com/sheshbabu/Chital https://github.com/sheshbabu/Chital Launches fast and weighs less than 2MB in size!
- apitman 1y agoKudos for making an effort to keep it small. Some of these Electron AppImages are 1GB+ which is pretty wild. How do you handle markdown rendering?
- rkwz 1y agoThanks! I use this package for markdown: https://github.com/gonzalezreal/swift-markdown-ui https://github.com/gonzalezreal/swift-markdown-ui
- nocommandline 1y ago> Some of these Electron AppImages are 1GB+ I recently released an Electron App for Ollama [1] and it's nowhere close to 1GB (between 300 - 350MB). A 1GB App would be really big 1) https://ai.nocommandline.com/ https://ai.nocommandline.com/
- behnamoh 1y agoWow, is it a coincidence that every comment that says anything negative about ollama gets downvoted/flagged into oblivion? what is going on in this thread?
- mchiang 1y agoWe don't have this kind of power, and in fact, most our posts gets deleted so we don't post. We do read comments and help if we can. Negative comments help us grow and make Ollama better any way. We can take harsh feedback to make Ollama better.
- behnamoh 1y agoTo be clear, I didn't meant you guys manipulate the comments. It was just weird seeing even @swyx's comment get that much downvotes.
- tomhow 1y agoBarely any comments in the thread are flagged. The comment by swyx has a positive score. Some comments have been downweighted for being generic or off-topic, which is standard moderation; our role as moderators is to keep the discussion threads on-topic. But the comment that was left at the top of the thread after I'd done that seemed at least somewhat negative/critical towards the Ollama team. Which comments seem unreasonably low to you?
- xpe 1y agoI don't understand how you can know this, even if it is true. (I only see downvotes on my comments.)
- jadamson 1y agoComments with negative scores appear greyed out.
- pentagrama 1y agoLooks like a big pivot on target audience from developers to regular users, at least on the homepage https://ollama.com/ 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. Previously I tested several local LLM apps, and the 2 best ones to me were LM Studio [1] and Msty [2]. Will check this one out for sure. One missing feature that the ChatGPT desktop app has and I think is a good idea for these local LLM apps is a shortcut to open a new chat anytime (Alt + Space), with a reduced UI. It is great for quick questions. [1] https://lmstudio.ai/ https://lmstudio.ai/ [2] https://msty.app/ https://msty.app/
- apitman 1y agoIs there a way to get LM Studio to talk to remote OpenAI API servers and cloud providers?
- HumanOstrich 1y agoLM Studio is for hosting/serving local LLMs. Its chat UI is secondary and is pretty limited.
- apitman 1y agoGood to know, thanks. What do people generally use to connect to it for chat?
- nullbyte 1y agoAak! Finally! This was long overdue!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- alsetmusic 1y agoThis doesn't appear to indicate whether the model is running locally, so I assume it's not. I'll continue to run Ollama locally in my terminal on the rare occasions that I see a use for it.
- mchiang 1y agothe model is running locally - you can check by turning off the wifi.
- KoftaBob 1y agoIn addition to what others have said, I've had great experiences with LobeChat: https://github.com/lobehub/lobe-chat https://github.com/lobehub/lobe-chat
- yencabulator 1y agoYet another project that lies about being open source. > b. a commercial license must be obtained from the producer if you want to develop and distribute a derivative work based on LobeChat.
- spacecadet 1y agoIm surprised it took this long. I vibe coded the same interface last year using electron... just not Ollama because there are just better architectures/pipelines...
- accrual 1y agoI gave the Ollama UI a try on Windows after using the CLI service for a while. - I like the simplicity. This would be perfect for setting up a non-technical friend or family member with a local LLM with just a couple clicks - Multimodal and Markdown support works as expected - The model dropdown shows both your local models and other popular models available in the registry I could see using this over Open WebUI for basic use cases where one doesn't need to dial in the prompt or advanced parameters. Maybe those will be exposed later. But for now - I feel the simplicity is a strength.
- kroaton 1y agoIf you like simple, try out Jan as well. https://github.com/menloresearch/jan https://github.com/menloresearch/jan
- accrual 1y agoSmall update: thinking models also work well. I like that it shows the thinking stream in a fainter style while it generates, then hides it to show the final output when it's ready. The thinking output is still available with a click. Another commenter mentioned not being able to point the new UI to a remote Ollama instance - I agree, that would be super handy for running the UI on a slow machine but inferring on something more powerful.
- accrual 1y agoUpdate 2: I've been using the new Ollama desktop UI on Windows for a couple days now (released 4 days ago). - I still appreciate the simplicity to the point where I use it more the Open WebUI - no logins, no settings, just chat - I wish the model select in the chat box was either moved or was more subtle, currently it visually draws interest to something that doesn't change much - Chat summaries sometimes overflow in the chat history area - Small nit but the window uses the default app icon on Windows rather than the Ollama icon
- SamPatt 1y agoNo Linux, that's a bummer. I've been using it in Linux for inference for ages, it's pretty easy to use. I'll stick with OpenWebUI then.
- coder543 1y agoI 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.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoThe app does have a function to expose Ollama to the network, so perhaps its coming?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- hodgehog11 1y agoIt's definitely coming, there is no way they would leave such an important feature on the table. My guess is they are waiting so they can announce connections to their own servers.
- jart 1y agoThis. 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, it makes me want to scream and shout and retire from tech forever to be a plumber.
- tux1968 1y agoYou 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.
- 1y ago
- thorum 1y agoIf you’re a power user of these LLMs and have coding experience, I actually recommend just whipping together your own bespoke chat UI that you can customize however you like. Grab any OpenAI compatible endpoint for inference and a frontend component framework (many of which have added standard Chat components) - the rest is almost trivial. I threw one together in a week with Gemini’s assistance and now I use it every day. Is it production ready? Hell no but it works exactly how I want it to and whenever I find myself saying “I wish it could do XYZ…” I just add it.
- pmarreck 1y ago[flagged]
- steve_adams_86 1y ago> Tell me you're not in charge of young kids Yeah, my wife would murder me as our kids yelled at me for various things
- Arubis 1y ago> I don't know if parenting hits the "developer-tinkerer class" harder than others, but damn. I sort of suspect so? Devs of parenting age trend towards being neurospicy, and dev work requires sustained attention with huge penalties for interruptions.
- n_kr 1y agoI have a 1yo too, and I could do it. I used the other tools to make one which I liked.
- tomhow 1y ago> Tell me you're not in charge of young kids without telling me you're not in charge of young kids Please avoid internet tropes on HN. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- bapak 1y agoThis is the most "just build your own Linux" comment I read this year. Just download some tool and be productive within seconds, I'd say.
- danielcorin 1y agoI’ve been building a Swift app [1], compatible with OpenAI APIs, easy model switching across providers, and with hotkeys for OS integration to capture text and images. It’s far more minimal than most other LLM frontends I’ve tried, but it’s been sticky for me. [1]: https://www.wvlen.llc/apps/tomo https://www.wvlen.llc/apps/tomo
- throwawaylaptop 1y agoI must be stupid because I don't understand how this is different than having several tabs open in a browser with all the AI services I'd like open?
- whoisstan 1y agoOllama runs all local, away from prying corps.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoRepackaging other people's work while adding literally nothing useful is Ollama's entire gig. This hype bubble is as disgusting and scummy as the previous one.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoOK, for those interested, I have a Ryzen9 2700 with a 12GB RX6750XT and downloaded Gemma3:4b because that was what the app suggested first. The speed seems fine to me, but the hallucinations are wild, completely wrong on a few things I like to test the commercial offerings on. For simple questions about the lua language and how to do things in Unity game engine the results look fairly OK.
- jeffhuys 1y agoHonestly to be expected with a 4b model. 12b/14b+ is the minimum in my experience to get decent results, unless you have a specific use-case for the 4b ones and fine-tune it to your use.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoYeah, I tried Deepseek 8b as well and it was hopeless, but it was interesting to watch it think. I haven't seen that before.
- tonyhart7 1y agohow long until we can have tools support like mcp and another integration to github,youtube etc
- ekianjo 1y agocompletely 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.
- jillesvangurp 1y agoOllama 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.
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y agothey got all the LLMs in the world, and all they can do is spit electron slop.. nice
- witnessme 1y agoWell, they gotta do what they gotta do. But as a developer, this kills the positioning and trust it had for me. I do not see it as a developer tool project anymore.
- hodgehog11 1y agoNot surprising; Ollama is set on becoming the standard interface for companies to deploy "open" models. The focus on "local" is incidental, and likely not long term. I'm sure Ollama is going to announce a plan to use "open" models through their own cloud-based API using this app.
- grumbelbart2 1y ago> The focus on "local" is incidental Strongly disagree with this. It is the default go-to for companies that cannot use cloud-based services for IP or regulatory reasons (think of defense contractors). Isn't that the main reason to use "open" models, which are still weaker than closed ones?
- theshrike79 1y agoWe are specifically using Ollama, because our stuff CANNOT leave the company internal net. Any whiff of a cloud service and the lawyers will freak out. That's why we run models via Ollama on our laptops (M-series is crazy powerful) and a few servers on the intranet for more oomph. LM Studio changed their license to allow commercial use without "call me" pricing, so we might look into that more too.
- diggan 1y ago> Ollama is set on becoming the standard interface for companies to deploy "open" models. That's not what I've been seeing, but obviously my perspective (as anyone's) is limited. What I'm seeing is deployments of vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp or even HuggingFace's Transformers with their own wrapper, at least for inference with open weight models. Somehow, the only place where I come across recommendations for running Ollama was on HN and before on r/LocalLlama but not even there as of late. The people who used to run Ollama for local inference (+ OpenWebUI) now seem to mostly be running LM Studio, myself included too.
- longnguyen 1y agoCongrats 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 https://boltai.com
- anshumankmr 1y agoThis is good. I much prefer this.
- bravesoul2 1y agoDoes this one not fuck up the downloads like the CLI?
- countfeng 1y agoFor ordinary people's computers, the 4-core16G configuration and the installed model arerelatively less practical.
- airtonix 1y ago[dead]
- trilogix 1y agoNot sure but looks like HugstonOne is rocking in comparison :)
- dzonga 1y agowhat are some of the best small scale models to run locally on a laptop ? on ollama ?
- dwaaa 1y agoI need more than text. I need recognise audio to text (not only english) longest than 30s. I need generate audio. And generate image. This is important. text is trivial
- 1dom 1y agoI don't understand this move. A frontend desktop application is the opposite of what I and anyone else I know uses Ollama for. It's a local LLM backend. It's been around long enough now that any long term users have found, created and/or adjusted to their own front end interface. I'm comfy, but some of the cutting edge local LLMs have been a little bit slow to be available recently, maybe this frontend focus is why. I will now go and look at other options like Ollama that have either been fully UI integrated since the start, or that is committed to just being a headless backend. If any of them seem better, I'll consider switching, I probably should have done this sooner. I hope this isn't the first step in Ollama dropping the local CLI focus, offering a subscription and becoming a generic LLM interface like so many of these tools seem to converge on.
- graemep 1y agoThere are many GUIs for Ollama. This looks like a version of Ollama that bundles one.
- 1dom 1y agoI agree. I just can't see a user-focused benefit for a backend service provider to start building and bundling their own frontend when there's already a bunch of widely used frontends available.
- mchiang 1y agoRightful worry, and we had the same doubts before we embarked on this. Ollama serves developers, there is no doubt about that. The CLI isn’t getting dropped, in fact, what we’ve learned in building it is having the interface interacting with Ollama is a great way for us to dogfood Ollama while building it. There are so many choices for having an interface, and as a developer you should have a choice in selecting the UI you want. It will all continue to work with Ollama. Nothing about that changes.
- 1dom 1y agoThanks for the response, appreciated. It confirms my feelings though: there are already so many choices for an interface, why are you - a team of people who built a backend LLM - now spending your time doing front end stuff under the same backend product name? This is sending a very loud message that your focus is drifting away from why I use your product. If it was drifting away into something new and original that supplements my usage of your product, I could see the value, but like you said: there's already so many choices of good interface. Now you're going to have to play catchup against people whose first choice and genuine passion is LLM frontend UIs. Sorry! I will still use ollama, and thank you so much for all the time and effort put in. I probably wouldn't have had a fraction of the local LLM fun I've had if it wasn't for ollama, even if my main usage is through openwebui. Ultimately, my personal preference is software that does 1 thing and does it well. Others prefer the opposite: tightly integrated all-bells-and-whistles, and I'm sure those people will appreciate this more than me - do what works for you, it's worked so far:)
- raideno 1y agoI hope they'll open source it so we can contribute new ideas to the app.
- okasaki 1y agoIt needs web search, because the smaller models often lack information. Also a display of whether a model fits into vram would be nice.
- asim 1y agoMakes total sense. You cannot be constrained by the CLI when do much of what models do is multimodal and graphical. I don't think this dilutes their efforts in running the models or the CLI. In fact it's a huge enhancement and helps them penetrate the enterprise market in the long term. And the reality is, when you take VC funding for an open source tool, your customer basis is going to be the enterprise and your inevitable goal is to become a profitable business. Do not let any of the delusions of Docker fool you. Build a thing, take VC money, you need to return that investment with profit. Unfortunately free things and Dev centric tooling often make it very difficult to establish that business model. So for Ollama to take this UI approach potentially let's them then monetize a lot of things around the GUI and leave the CLI tool free.
- gullevek 1y agoI mean, nice but something like open-webui is just gazillions times better. This is just a GUI to the command line ...
- ai_viewz 1y agoI have been experimenting many LLMs in Ollama, but the opensource models are still behind paid versions like Cohere. Any model which gives onpar performance and quality of result compared to Cohere , please let me know
- smcleod 1y agoAren't cohere's models pretty dated now? They don't even show up on leaderboards (synthetic or real) these days. What about GLM 4.5, Qwen 3 235b 2507 or even just Qwen 3 32b 2507 etc...
- jacooper 1y agoI don't think this is necessary on desktop, you can just use a browser. For me what is needed is an assistant native app for Android, something like perplexitys assistant mode that replaces gemini. It would make using your own LLM with your phone, since you can then interact with apps.
- mark_l_watson 1y agoI have been happy using Ollama via the command line and via API, but I am sold on their new UI for coding. I was just using the newly updated qwen3:30b model for coding, and I like the <copy> button in the too right corner of generated code listings - a simple thing but useful.
- smcleod 1y agoInteresting to see its source is missing from the GitHub repo. A pivot to closed source perhaps?
- 999900000999 1y agoI absolutely love this. I installed this last night on one of my cheaper computers. Ran gemma3:4b on a 16GB Ram laptop, I know HN loves specifics, so it's this exact computer ( with an upgraded 2 TB SSD). ASUS - Vivobook S 14 - 14" OLED Laptop - Copilot+ PC - Intel Core Ultra 5 - 16GB Memory - 512GB SSD - Neutral Black It's a bit slower than o4-mini and probably not as smart, but I feel more secure in asking for a resume review. The GUI really makes pasting in text significantly easier. Yeah I know I could just use the cli app and postman previously, but I didn't want to set that up.
- numbers 1y agodoes anyone have a suggestion on running LLMs locally on a windows PC and then accessing them (thru an app / gui) on mac? My windows PC is a gaming PC with a pretty good GPU and I'd like to take advantage of that.
- J_Shelby_J 1y agoStart llamacpp server with the gui accessible to your Mac?
- underlines 1y agoHeads up, there’s a fair bit of pushback (justified or not) on r/LocalLLaMA about Ollama’s tactics: Vendor lock-in: AFAIK it now uses a proprietary llama.cpp fork and builts its own registry on ollama.com in a kind of docker way (I heard docker ppl are actually behind ollama) and it's a bit difficult to reuse model binaries with other inference engines due to their use of hashed filenames on disk etc. Closed-source tweaks: Many llama.cpp improvements haven’t been upstreamed or credited, raising GPL concerns. They since switched to their own inference backend. Mixed performance: Same models often run slower or give worse outputs than plain llama.cpp. Tradeoff for convenience - I know. Opaque model naming: Rebrands or filters community models without transparency, biggest fail was calling the smaller Deepseek-R1 distills just "Deepseek-R1" adding to a massive confusion on social media and from "AI Content Creators", that you can run "THE" DeepSeek-R1 on any potato. Difficult to change Context Window default: Using Ollama as a backend, it is difficult to change default context window size on the fly, leading to hallucinations and endless circles on output, especially for Agents / Thinking models. --- If you want better, (in some cases more open) alternatives: llama.cpp: Battle-tested C++ engine with minimal deps and faster with many optimizations ik_llama.cpp: High-perf fork, even faster than default llama.cpp llama-swap: YAML-driven model swapping for your endpoint. LM Studio: GUI for any GGUF model—no proprietary formats with all llama.cpp optimizations available in a GUI Open WebUI: Front-end that plugs into llama.cpp, ollama, MPT, etc.
- J_Shelby_J 1y agoAnd llamacpp has a gui out of the box that’s decent.
- therealpygon 1y ago“Justified or not” — is certainly a useful caveat when giving the same credit to a few people who complain loudly with mostly unauthentic complaints. > Vendor lock-in That is, probably the most ridiculous of the statements. Ollama is open source, llama.cpp is open source, llamafiles are zip files that contain quantized versions of models openly available to be run with numerous other providers. Their llama.cpp changes are primarily for performance and compatibility. Yes, they run a registry on ollama.com for pre-packed, pre-quantized versions of models that are, again, openly available. > Closed-source tweaks Oh so many things wrong in a short sentence. Llama.cpp is MIT licensed, not GPL license. A proprietary fork is perfectly legitimate use. Also.. “proprietary“? The source code is literally available, including the patches, on GitHub in ollama/ollama project, in the “llama” folder with a patch file as recent as yesterday? > Mixed Performance Yes, almost anything suffers degraded performance when the goal is usability instead of performance. It is why people use C# instead of Assembly or punch cards. Performance isn’t the only metric, which makes this a useless point. > Opaque model name Sure, their official models have some ambiguities sometimes. I don’t know know that is the “problem” that people make it out to be when ollama is designed for average people to run models, and so a decision like “ollama run qwen3” not being the absolutely maximum best option possible rather than the option most people can run makes sense. Do really think it is advantageous or user friendly, when Tommy wants to try out “Deepseek-r1” on his potato laptop that a 671b parameter model too large to fit on almost anything consumer computer is the right choice and that it is instead meant as a “deception”? That seems…disingenuous. Not to mention, they are clearly listed as such on ollama.com, where in black and white it says the deep seek-r1 by default refers with the qwen model, and that the full model is available as deep seek-r1:671b > Context Window Probably the only fair and legitimate criticism of your entire comment. I’m not an ollama defender or champion, couldn’t care about the company, and I barely use ollama (mostly just to run qwen3-8b for embedding). It really is just that most of these complaints you’re sharing from others seem to have TikTok-level fact checking.
- iamshrimpy 1y ago[dead]
- hardfire 1y agoI couldn't find the source for the new app, is it open source like the cli or is it rather closed?
- jalalx 1y agonah, UI source is not published