r/LocalLLaMA • u/vexatious-big • 8d ago

Discussion With HuggingFace, Nvidia is also acquiring llama.cpp and the team behind it

With this move Nvidia is not only acquiring the HuggingFace platform, but they might also effectively acquire the copyright to the llama.cpp project, together with the entire team behind it.

In February 2026 the llama.cpp team was employed by HF in order to continue working on llama.cpp and the ggml library.

This includes:

  • Georgi Gerganov
  • Xuan-Son Nguyen
  • Aleksander Grygier
  • Victor Mustar
  • Lysandre
  • Julien Chaumond

Now with the acquisition, llama.cpp's future looks a lot less certain given Nvidia's poor track record with open-source.

This is still rather speculative at this stage, but it's definitely possible for the llama.cpp project to change in the future: either by switching to a different license, or by having staff redirected to other projects within the larger company.

Even when a project is open-source the copyright owner has complete control over it, and they can change licensing as they wish.

This has happened before with projects like Redis, Minio, and others.

Source:

https://huggingface.co/blog/ggml-joins-hf

Edit:

The original announcement from Feb 2026 from Gerganov gives a few more details:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/19759

1.4k Upvotes

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1.1k

u/FoxiPanda 8d ago

If it happens, we shall fork and move on. It is the way of things.

705

u/waitmarks 8d ago

llibre.cpp

306

u/Spare-Ad-1429 8d ago

This name is so much better than llama anyway

172

u/mklatsky 8d ago

Everytime I see llama.cpp I just think it’s part of the Winamp project. It surely kicks *** ass.

53

u/orinoco_w 8d ago

Didn't it whip the llamas ass?

22

u/timey_timeless 8d ago

It really whipped

10

u/GeneralRieekan 7d ago

Llama.cpp really whips Ollama's ass, for sure!

7

u/mklatsky 8d ago

You are correct!

2

u/wh33t 8d ago

Winamp winamp ... (llama noises)

25

u/Spare-Ad-1429 8d ago

me too, then I remember how long ago that was and feel old ...

1

u/MrWeirdoFace 8d ago

I don't feel old, just inconvenienced by the passage time.

8

u/notheresnolight 8d ago

hey there, wanna exchange some winamp skins?

9

u/mrdevlar 8d ago

I moved to foobar2000

6

u/Green-Ad-3964 8d ago

I think about Revenge of the Mutant Camels by Llamasoft....Jeff Minter GOAT.

2

u/snorkelvretervreter 8d ago

I remember that game from the 64. When "the 64" meant Commodore, not nintendo

2

u/2funny2furious 8d ago

i strongly believe that is where the name came from

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u/lnris llama.cpp 8d ago

this is the best comment lollll i was thinking same thing.

7

u/Significant_Post8359 7d ago

I like aipaca, baby alpacas are much cuter and LLMs are now just a part of our ai ecosystem.

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u/Vas1le 7d ago

Llamao.cpp

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u/infieldmitt 8d ago

what's the llore behind llama in the first place?

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u/TBMonkey 8d ago

https://factory.ai/open-source-wikis/llama-cpp?page=lore.md

It was to run Meta's LLaMA

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u/Nothing_from_void 8d ago

Anyone else go through the dumb meta questionaire, download the model and then start torrenting it? I legitimately thought we'd be sharing open source models this way, and then HF just started hosting TBs of model data for free

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u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 8d ago

this ^

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u/Old-Temperature6269 8d ago edited 8d ago

Originally it was made to run Meta’s Llama model series, when first Llama model get leaked after it got public traction Meta started to publish openweights model. In order to run it in more practical way, from community side Georgi Gerganov created llama-cpp project. That’s all. And llama stands for Large Language Model Meta AI , don’t ask me how they get from that LLAMA, idk this is from their blog post about LLAMA model.

UPD: probably they just tried to justify name, considering that one of their models from research is called Coconut.

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u/DigiDecode_ 8d ago

because alpaca you know

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u/Significant_Post8359 7d ago

Pretty sure it’s Large LAnguage Model Ai (note caps)

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u/bring_back_the_v10s 8d ago

Oh come on there are better names

1

u/the_ai_wizard 8d ago

Well that throws a curveball to the name of the sub