Here's why I think it's working so well, as someone who's participating in llama.cpp development and who has participated in many other open source projects:

1) Reviews are super fast. Sometimes I get the first review 5 minutes after submitting a PR. Today I had a PR merged with two reviews within 42 minutes. This is incredible work by the whole team. It keeps contributors motivated. The pace is intoxicating. On other projects, I've sometimes been waiting months for a review.

2) Georgi motivates people by giving them responsibility. There's no gatekeeping as with other projects. He happily delegates. You do good work? It's appreciated, and you get the freedom you need to make an impact. That feels awesome.

I've rarely become addicted to an open-source project so quickly.

I have been using a PR branch to run GLM 5.3 flash locally so I have been watching the dueling PRs develop to implement it and all the comments and reviews. You're right the scale of it is huge. The speed with which maintainers and community are responding is also super impressive.

I know there's a lot of discussion about AI overwhelming OS maintainers and I can see that. It does seem like llama.cpp is successfully riding that dragon right now though.

While true, enshittification should be mourned every time it's renewed until some real kind of block (regulatory changes to the industry) exists.

This is like a company buying your local public pool, and you trying to convince everyone that things won't slowly turn to crap.

I only need the license agreement to download and use CUDA/CUDNN, nvidia-smi, DLSS and proprietary drivers. Nvidia's not Apple, they don't make you register with them for basic SDK access.

Here's the content of the tweet so you don't have to give twitter any more traffic:

  Hugging Face has been acquired by NVIDIA

  It is quite exciting to be a part of this journey! NVIDIA has been an active supporter of the llama.cpp project. For more than a year now, their engineers have actively contributed to the codebase, collaborated with the community and provisioned hardware for development and testing purposes. The local AI ecosystem has largely benefited from our joint efforts.

  Going forward, llama.cpp/ggml will stick to its founding principles. One of the most important  qualities of the project is to be hardware-agnostic. Therefore the development and support of all backends will continue to be done as usual - driven and shaped by the community. Open to everyone who is willing to participate. The existence of such an independent software platform is crucial for the rapid adoption of AI locally and for bringing it closer to the user.

  Now, with such a significant partner as NVIDIA supporting us, in addition to the wider Hugging Face team, I believe that our long-term goals will be easier to achieve. We will remain focused on building one of the most exciting projects based on the most exciting technology of our lifetime and making it truly available to everyone in the most accessible and efficient way possible.

"On Monday 24th August at 8PM EST, we received at letter from X Corp. asking to cease and desist the service XCancel.

The service XCancel is stopped until further notice.

We are seeking legal advice and won't share more details for now.

Thank you for the trust you have put in these two years of XCancel."

The answer to this question is, also, "X threw a fit". They sent Cease & Desists to nitter and xcancel.

They got a C&D.

> Can we take this as an official statement that Nvidia supports local models?

The first reply on the X thread is by Gerardo Delgado, who is "Sr. Director of Product - Local AI, Creators, Developers @NVIDIA" according to his profile. In his post, he says "My team's goal at NVIDIA is to grow Local AI."

Why would they not? The cost to do that is 0.000001% of whatever numbers they usually work with. The upside is that it creates a community of hobbyists, most of whom will us (consummer grade) Nvidia GPUs. Which are not a significant source of revenue for Nvidia anymore, but it’s nice to have a bit of insurance.

> Can we take this as an official statement that Nvidia supports local models?

Hedging against a data center bubble burst or at least massive pullback

Trivial for them to cut margin on desktop cards and clean up/prop up falling data center sales serving the hungry gamer, blockchain, local AI that's been sitting on its hands the last year or two

Nvidia is the PC ecosystem's best answer to Apple