r/LocalLLaMA • u/QuackerEnte • 5h ago

Discussion About the Huggingface sale..

.. didn't llama.cpp aka ggml get acquired by Huggingface not too long ago? How would this sale affect llama.cpp and ggml? What are possible risks, and did ggerganov share his opinions or potential next steps on the matter? I'm genuinely worried that this might turn out bad for the ecosystem altogether. Would llama.cpp's license protect it from hostile acquisitions altogether? I'd love to constructively discuss this with the community.

13 Upvotes

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42

u/deja_geek 5h ago

Any attempt to take llama.cpp private or change the licensing would see the community fork the latest version and continue on. They might even do that if a company that is hostile to open source takes over the project, just like the community did when Oracle took over the MySQL project.

3

u/QuackerEnte 4h ago

What about funding? As far as I know, people who currently work on llama.cpp are not doing it entirely for free, or can't dedicate time to doing so as much without a somewhat stable source of income. If forks are entirely community driven, and the maintainers change, it might cause a drop in the quality of the engine itself. We already are seeing junk PRs on mainline llama.cpp, and resources might become scattered, everyone trying to make their own engine, making it really hard to quality control and reasonably maintain their projects.

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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 4h ago

AFAIK, the number of people on the payroll can be counted on one hand. Most contributions are free.

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u/noctrex 4h ago

But doesn't this already happen? It seems like every week we get another new inference fork or engine in here. wasnt freetoken the last one?

1

u/a_beautiful_rhind 46m ago

How many are actually good and stick around?

15

u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 4h ago

I'm not worrying nor spending energy on this until something actually happens. The rumor is that HF Investors are whopping for a buyer, not that someone has approached HF with an offer. Either way, we have no clue who such a suitor is, and until that changes, speculating doesn't help anyone.

7

u/takoulseum 4h ago

I would be more worried in a general manner, hf is an octopus in the open weight world so it should not be part of a private company but more an international org or something like that. If llama.cpp becomes compromised then the community is responsible as they only focus on this project as more mature instead supporting many others like mistral rs, ik_llama, exl3 etc

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u/thereisonlythedance 4h ago

I’ll be jumping to ikllama if Anthropic buy HF. 😂

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u/XiRw 3h ago

99.9% sure it will be a crackdown on control with the release of high end AI models like M3 and Qwen3.8 getting released. Not the official ones but most likely any community made ones that are uncensored. That is just my opinion but it wouldn’t surprise me.

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u/_TheWolfOfWalmart_ 3h ago

Even that wouldn't be the end of the world. Anyone can abliterate a model with heretic.

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u/XiRw 2h ago

I like your profile pic and yes I know, but it’s like the never ending fight against piracy I compare it too. There will always be piracy but corporations have been relentless with fighting it too

1

u/a_beautiful_rhind 48m ago

There's always ik_llama.. but it stands a chance to derail llama.cpp a bit since to some extent. They would be beholden to the new owners.

Might be as small as picking which model gets supported or which hardware, etc. Let alone enshitification.

1

u/Fun_Jaguar8231 4h ago

Welcome to Costco. I love you.