Ollama , the local inference platform, stays completely local. Maintained by a non-profit org with dev time contributed to by a for-profit company. That company can be VC backed and can make their cloud inference platform. And can use ollama as its backed, as a platform to market etc. But keep it as a separate product (not named ollama).
This is almost exactly how duckdb/motherduck functions and I think theyre doing an excellent job.
You might want to check out RamaLama. It's a container based replacement for Ollama by the same folks that brought us Podman.
I tried it a while back, I was very surprised to find that simply running `uvx ramalama run deepseek-r1:1.5b` just worked. I'm on Fedora Silverblue with nothing layered on the ostree. Before RamaLama, getting llama.cpp working with my GPU was a major PITA.
If I were them I'd go whole-hog on local models and:
* Work with somebody like System76 or Framework to create great hardware systems come with their ecosystem preinstalled.
* Build out a PaaS, perhaps in partnership with an existing provider, that makes it easy for anybody to do what Ollama search does. I'm more than half certain I could convince our cash strapped organization to ditch elastic search for that.
* Partner with Home Assistant, get into home automation and wipe the floor with Echo and its ilk (yeah basically resurrect Mycroft but add whole-house automation to it).
Each of those are half-baked, but it also took me 7 minutes to come up with them, and they seem more in line with what Ollama tries to represent than a pure cloud play using low-power models.
This is almost exactly how duckdb/motherduck functions and I think theyre doing an excellent job.
EDIT: grammar and readability