Ollama CEO: Cloud token usage up 150x this year as Fortune 500 shifts to open models
ycombinator · x · 2026-09-04
On YC's Lightcone Podcast, Ollama co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan shares that the tool now serves 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving him a unique vantage point on real-world model usage.
Key takeaways:
- The biggest shift is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and open models rapidly catching up to frontier labs
- Ollama Cloud has seen a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year
- Morgan believes 80–90% of enterprise tokens could eventually run on open models
- He argues for a local-plus-cloud future where AI "comes back to your computer," and forsees an era of unlimited tokens
The episode also covers Ollama's origin story: two years searching for the right idea, the pivotal change, finding a business model, and new opportunities above the model layer — including whether we still need a "god model."
More from Companies & People
- Meta details 2026 GEM ads model: Kunlun architecture brings 2.5x complexity growth — Meta_Engineers · 2026-10-21
- Stanford HAI welcomes 15 new scholars to its Data Science Scholars Program — StanfordHAI · 2026-10-21
- Brandon Galang announces departure from Vercel, teases next move — brandon_galang · 2026-10-20
- Ex-OpenAI policy chief blasts OpenAI's retreat from AI chip controls to appease Nvidia — Miles_Brundage · 2026-10-20
- Carnegie Mellon names Jignesh Patel founding dean of new Miami campus — sh_reya · 2026-10-20
- NVIDIA lands in Europe: Jensen Huang and German chancellor discuss industrial AI at GTC Berlin — nvidia · 2026-10-20