I tried it recently and couldn't figure out why it existed. It's just a very feature limited app that doesn't require you to know anything or be able to read a model card to "do AI".

And that more or less answered it.

It’s because most devs nowadays are new devs and probably aren’t very familiar with native compilation.

So compiling the correct version of llama.cpp for their hardware is confusing.

Compound that with everyone’s relative inexperience with configuring any given model and you have prime grounds for a simple tool to exist.

That’s what ollama and their Modelfiles accomplish.

It's just because it's convenient. I wrote a rich text editor front end for llama.cpp and I originally wrote a quick go web server with streaming using the go bindings, but now I just use ollama because it's just simpler and the workflow for pulling down models with their registry and packaging new ones in containers is simpler. Also most people who want to play around with local models aren't developers at all.

I'm not sure why you are assuming that ollama users are developers when there are at least 30 different applications that have direct API integration with ollama.

Eh, I've been building native code for decades and hit quite a few roadblocks trying to get llama.cpp building with cuda support on my Ubuntu box. Library version issues and such. Ended up down a rabbit hole related to codenames for the various Nvidia architectures... It's a project on hold for now.

Weirdly, the Python bindings built without issue with pip.

Edited it out of my original comment because I didn't want to seem ranty/angry/like I have some personal vendatta, as opposed to just being extremely puzzled, but it legit took me months to realize it wasn't a GUI because of how it's discussed on HN, i.e. as key to democratizing, as a large, unique, entity, etc.

Hadn't thought about it recently. After seeing it again here, and being gobsmacked by the # of genuine, earnest, comments assuming there's extensive independent development of large pieces going on in it, I'm going with:

- "The puzzled feeling you have is simply because llama.cpp is a challenge on the best of days, you need to know a lot to get to fully accelerated on ye average MacBook. and technical users don't want a GUI for an LLM, they want a way to call an API, so that's why there isn't content extalling the virtues of GPT4All*. So TL;DR you're old and have been on computer too much :P"

but I legit don't know and still can't figure it out.

* picked them because they're the most recent example of a genuinely democratizing tool that goes far beyond llama.cpp and also makes large contributions back to llama.cpp, ex. GPT4All landed 1 of the 2 vulkan backends