How does Ollama work?

The project, released in mid-2023, has become the standard way for developers and small teams to run Llama, Mistral, Phi, Gemma, Qwen, and dozens of other open models on their own hardware. Ollama exposes an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint by default, making it a drop-in replacement for cloud LLMs in development and air-gapped scenarios. The platform strengthens enterprise