Musts

Ollama is a local AI platform for running, managing, and sharing open models on your own machine or private infrastructure. It makes it easy to pull models, serve them through an API, and integrate local inference into developer workflows without relying on a fully managed cloud stack. Teams use Ollama for privacy-sensitive assistants, internal tools, offline experimentation, and rapid testing of open-weight models across laptops, workstations, and servers. It is especially useful for developers, operators, and AI builders who want quick setup with less operational overhead. What makes Ollama distinctive is how approachable it is: it packages model runtime, distribution, and deployment into a streamlined experience that helps people get productive with local AI in minutes instead of spending days on configuration.

OpenAgentd is a self-hosted AI-agent OS that runs entirely on the user’s machine. It provides a web cockpit, streaming chat, persistent editable memory, tool use, workspace file browsing, image viewing, local voice transcription, scheduling and multi-agent teams with lead-worker delegation. Agents can read and write files, run shell commands, search the web, generate media, manage todos and extend capabilities via skills or MCP servers. The tool is for users who want a local, inspectable alternative to cloud-only agent workspaces. It is notable now because privacy, long-running autonomy and multi-agent coordination are converging into desktop systems rather than isolated chat tabs.

Together AI is an AI inference and training cloud platform that provides fast, cost-effective access to open-weight models. It offers fine-tuning, inference endpoints, and a startup program for early-stage companies building on open AI. Targeted at developers and startups who want an alternative to proprietary model APIs with transparent pricing and open-model support.