Press Space to continue
Open models are closing the gap with frontier AI systems
Press Space to continue
Open models are closing the intelligence gap, says @ollama's @jmorgan. That opens up a new opportunity for founders: coordinating fast, cheap models to solve more complex problems. “We’re maybe less than three months behind between the frontier closed models and the open models. But the next problem to solve is extreme efficiency.” “They’re good enough for 80% of the tasks, they’re really fast and they’re ultra cheap.” “That class of models, in my mind, will be the first ones that come down…
Y Combinator@ycombinatorSep 4
🦙 @ollama is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan (@jmorgan) a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing. Right now, the biggest shift he sees is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and capabilities that are rapidly catching up to the frontier labs. On Ollama Cloud, that shift has driven a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year. In this episode of @LightconePod, Jeff joins @garrytan, @snowmaker, @sdianahu, and @harjtaggar to talk about the future of open models and the story behind Ollama, from two years of searching for the right idea to building one of the most widely used AI developer tools in the world. 00:43 — The Shift to Open Models 03:03 — How AI Agents Are Driving Token Usage 05:31 — Are Open Models Catching Up? 08:26 — What Happens When a New Model Launches 11:31 — Ollama as an Operating System for AI 14:05 — The New Opportunities Above the Model Layer 18:19 — Why 80–90% of Enterprise Tokens Could Be Open 20:57 — The Future Is Local and Cloud 26:40 — Why AI Is Coming Back to Your Computer 28:56 — The Coming Era of Unlimited Tokens 32:30 — Do We Still Need a “God Model”? 33:41 — Open Models and Geopolitics 36:14 — The Origins of Ollama 40:36 — Two Years Lost in the Wilderness 42:39 — The Pivot That Changed Everything 47:02 — How Ollama Found a Business Model 49:43 — Why Second-Time Founders Did YC
View