Ollama CEO: open models are now less than 3 months behind frontier, as Ollama Cloud token usage grows 150x
mchiang0610 · x · 2026-09-05
Ollama co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan told Y Combinator's Lightcone podcast that open models are closing the intelligence gap — "maybe less than three months behind" frontier closed models — opening a founder opportunity in coordinating fast, cheap "flash" models to tackle complex problems.
Key points:
- Ollama is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving Morgan a unique view of real-world model usage.
- The biggest current shift is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and rapidly improving capabilities. Ollama Cloud token usage has grown 150x since the start of the year.
- These models are "good enough for 80% of tasks, really fast and ultra cheap," and he expects them to be the first to reach "unlimited tokens" pricing.
- The next problem to solve is "extreme efficiency"; coordinating multiple small models can match results from bigger ones.
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