Presumably Ollama had been working on this for quite a while already - it sounds like they've broken their initial dependency on llama.cpp. Being in charge of their own destiny makes a lot of sense.
I'd hoped to see this mentioned in TFA, but it kind of acts like multimodal is totally new to Ollama, which it isn't.
llama.cpp did have multimodal, I've been maintaining an integration for many moons now. (Feb 2024? Original LLaVa through Gemma 3)
However, this was not for mere mortals. It was not documented and had gotten unwieldy, to say the least.
ngxson (HF employee) did a ton of work to get gemma3 support in, and had to do it in a separate binary. They dove in and landed a refactored backbone that is presumably more maintainable and on track to be in what I think of as the real Ollama, llama.cpp's server binary.
As you well note, Ollama is Ollamaing - I joked, once, that the median llama.cpp contribution from Ollama is a driveby GitHub comment asking when a feature will land in llama-server, so it can be copy-pasted into Ollama.
It's really sort of depressing to me because I'm just one dude, it really wasn't that hard to support it (it's one of a gajillion things I have to do, I'd estimate 2 SWE-weeks at 10 YOE, 1.5 SWE-days for every model release), and it's hard to get attention for detailed work in this space with how much everyone exaggerates and rushes to PR.
EDIT: Coming back after reading the blog post, and I'm 10x as frustrated. "Support thinking / reasoning; Tool calling with streaming responses" --- this is table stakes stuff that was possible eons ago.
I don't see any sign of them doing anything specific in any of the code they link, the whole thing reads like someone carefully worked with an LLM to present a maximalist technical-sounding version of the llama.cpp stuff and frame it as if they worked with these companies and built their own thing. (note the very careful wording on this, e.g. in the footer the companies are thanked for releasing the models)
I think it's great that they have a nice UX that helps people run llama.cpp locally without compiling, but it's hard for me to think of a project I've been more by turned off by in my 37 years on this rock.
Ollama is written in golang so of course they can not meaningfully contribute that back to llama.cpp.
Where do you imagine ggml is from?
> The llama.cpp project is the main playground for developing new features for the ggml library
-> https://github.com/ollama/ollama/tree/27da2cddc514208f4e2353...
(Hint: If you think they only write go in ollama, look at the commit history of that folder)
> Ollama is written in golang so of course they can not meaningfully contribute that back to llama.cpp.
llama.cpp consumes GGML.
ollama consumes GGML.
If they contribute upstream changes, they are contributing to llama.cpp.
The assertions that they:
a) only write golang
b) cannot upstream changes
Are both, categorically, false.
You can argue what 'meaningfully' means if you like. You can also believe whatever you like.
However, both (a) and (b), are false. It is not a matter of dispute.
> Whatever gotcha you think there is, exists only in your head.
There is no 'gotcha'. You're projecting. My only point is that any claim that they are somehow not able to contribute upstream changes only indicates a lack of desire or competence, not a lack of the technical capacity to do so.