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llama.cpp is the C++ library that powers Ollama and much of the local-LLM ecosystem. 2024 added speculative decoding with two- to three-fold speedups, an RPC server for sharding layers across machines, and a stable GGUF format. Ollama covers 90% of cases; going direct pays off with uncommon hardware or specific flags.
Ollama became the standard for running large language models locally in 2024. It wraps llama.cpp in a single binary with Docker-style CLI and an OpenAI-compatible API. Phi-3 Mini runs in 4 GB; Llama 3.1 8B Q4 needs 6 GB. For production traffic at scale, vLLM remains the correct choice.
With quantization, model weights are stored with fewer bits (4, 5, or 8 instead of 16), so Llama 2 13B shrinks from 26 GB to about 7.5 GB. With llama.cpp it runs on an ordinary 16GB-RAM laptop with no dedicated GPU, and the quality loss is smaller than intuition suggests.
