I’ve used them both for coding and they work really well (way better than you’d think). They’re also perfectly capable of the usual LLM chat stuff (e.g. check my grammar) but all the models (even older, smaller ones) are capable of that stuff these days.
For a treat: Have someone show you using some of these models to search the web! It’s amazing. You don’t see ads, you don’t have to comb through 12 pages of search results, and they read the pages that moment (not cached) to give you summaries of the content. So when you click the link to go to the content you know it’s the thing you were looking for. They’re not using a local index of the Internet, they’re searching on your behalf using whatever search engines you configured. It’s waaaaay better than ChatGPT (which uses Bing behind the scenes whether you like it or not) or Gemini (which uses Google, obviously). The (self-hosted) LLM will literally be running curl for you on Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or whatever TF else you want (simultaneously) then reading each of the search results and using your prompt to figure out what the most relevant results are. It’s sooooo nice!
FYI: Ollama.com’s library page is actually a great resource for finding info on all the models that can be self-hosted: https://ollama.com/library
I personally love glm-5 and qwen3.5, specifically: https://ollama.com/library/qwen3.5:122b
I’ve used them both for coding and they work really well (way better than you’d think). They’re also perfectly capable of the usual LLM chat stuff (e.g. check my grammar) but all the models (even older, smaller ones) are capable of that stuff these days.
For a treat: Have someone show you using some of these models to search the web! It’s amazing. You don’t see ads, you don’t have to comb through 12 pages of search results, and they read the pages that moment (not cached) to give you summaries of the content. So when you click the link to go to the content you know it’s the thing you were looking for. They’re not using a local index of the Internet, they’re searching on your behalf using whatever search engines you configured. It’s waaaaay better than ChatGPT (which uses Bing behind the scenes whether you like it or not) or Gemini (which uses Google, obviously). The (self-hosted) LLM will literally be running
curlfor you on Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, or whatever TF else you want (simultaneously) then reading each of the search results and using your prompt to figure out what the most relevant results are. It’s sooooo nice!FYI: Ollama.com’s library page is actually a great resource for finding info on all the models that can be self-hosted: https://ollama.com/library