Maximilian: So how do you use Ollama
to run open models on your system?
Well, if you run the ollama command
in your terminal, in your command line,
you'll see a bunch of available commands
that you can combine with the ollama command.
For example, the very important run command,
which can be used to run a model as we learn here,
and that's indeed the command we need to execute,
well, to run a Large Language Model on our system here.
So ollama run, but then what?
Well, then you need to specify the model identifier
of the model that you wanna run here,
and you'll find that in the model's catalog
on the Ollama website, so on Ollama.com.
Now, there also are other ways of creating models
or of running models locally,
but I'll get back to those later.
Using the model's catalog is the most straightforward
and standard way of running models with Ollama.
So if you go here, you'll see a list of supported AI models,
and it's a very, very long list
because Ollama essentially supports
all the popular and important open Large Language Models
you also find on Hugging Face.
And indeed, the Ollama team typically is pretty fast
when it comes to adding support for a new model.
So therefore, in this Ollama model's catalog here,
you typically find all the important, latest,
and most popular open Large Language Models
you can run with Ollama.
For example, here, you also find deepseek-r1,
including the big one.
I'll get back to these different versions here in a second,
but you could in theory run the large one,
the one that shook up the AI industry
in early 2025 with Ollama.
Though I will say that even with quantization,
you probably don't have the hardware to run that.
But all these smaller models,
especially up to the 32 billion parameters,
would definitely be doable,
depending on the kind of hardware you have, of course.
And then there are plenty of other popular models as well.
For example, mistral models, llama models.
The gemma3, and also the older gemma models,
which are really amazing
and which do have vision capabilities,
so which can also be used to analyze images, for example.
And you can, in general, of course,
simply browse that catalog to find out
which model sounds most interesting to you.
As mentioned, you can also run models in another way,
and I'll get back to that later.
But this official model catalog is a good start.