I’ll be honest, when I first heard that Mozilla had come out with an AI I figured it was on the back of them trying a couple different ad scenarios, and assumed the worst. Pleasantly surprised by Orbit.
she was the face of the occupy wall street movement, but her views back then were more ancap than anti capital. while working for google she tried to petition the us government to shut itself down and hand the reins over to the tech industry, with google's ceo as president.
the base of the APE library that powers llamafile is called cosmopolitan libC, iirc in direct reference to the old soviet term.
to give credit she's mellowed out a lot in recent years.
llamafile is not really "effective". it's incredibly impressive, but it's the opposite of effective. it's a collection of a bunch of hacks reliant on coincidences in OS design, and works by basically recompiling itself on the fly to work with different architectures.
if you want effective, run llama.cpp compiled with actual optimizations for your platform.
By effective I mean, I downloaded one file, renamed it to .exe, ran it and now my shitty company laptop was running a basic LLM with actually lots of features, right then and there. I didn't even have a GPU or admin privileges, and it just worked
Sure, maybe it's possible to squeeze more performance out of a 3 years old laptop, but that was actually very usable out of the box. And I didn't even need to unbox it !