Ollama

Ollama is a tool for running open-weight language models on your own machine. The workflow is a command: pull a model by name and run it. The tool handles downloading the weights, choosing a quantization that fits available memory, and serving an API the rest of your software can call. The value is in removing the setup. Running a model locally normally means selecting a runtime, converting weights, and managing memory. Ollama packages that into a model file format and a local server, so a developer can try a model without assembling a stack first. A local model changes what is possible: prompts and outputs do not leave the machine, there is no per-token cost, and the model works without a network connection. The tradeoff is capability - a model that fits on a laptop is not the same as the largest hosted models - and the local server's API is compatible with common client libraries, so switching a prototype between local and hosted is mostly a configuration change.