A cpp binary depending on a python server is a bit sad.
I hope this is a stopgap measure and someone port it to C++ eventually:https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-common/blob/main/src/mi...
I hear the reason for this is that llama.cpp keeps breaking basic things, so they have become an unreliable partner. Seems this is what Ollama is trying to address by diluting their connections to llama.cpp and directly contacting companies training these models to have simultaneous releases (e.g. GPT-OSS).
They do release high quality inference code, ie https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-inference
Ollama brings value by exposing an API (literally over sockets) with many client SDKs. You don't even need the SDKs to use it effectively. If you're writing Node or PHP or Elixir or Clojurescript or whatever else you enjoy, you're probably covered.
It also means that you can swap models trivially, since you're essentially using the same API for each one. You never need to worry about dependency hell or the issues involved in hosting more than one model at a time.
As far as I know, Ollama is really the only solution that does this. Or at the very least, it's the most mature.
llama.cpp also got GPT-OSS early, like Ollama.
There's a lot of extremely subtle politics going on in the link.
Suffice it to say, as a commercial entity, there's a very clever way to put your thumb on the scale of what works and what doesn't without it being obvious to anyone involved, even the thumb.
Don't get me wrong, llama.cpp is an amazing tool. But it's development is nowhere near as cautious as something like the Linux kernel, so there is room there for a more stable alternative. Not saying Ollama will do this, but llama.cpp won't be everything to everyone.
But I also couldn't get vllm, or transformers serve, or ollama (400 response on /v1/chat/completions) working today with gpt-oss. OpenAI's cookbooks aren't really copy paste instructions. They probably tested on a single platform with preinstalled python packages which they forgot to mention :))
