Shimmy – 5MB privacy-first, local alternative to Ollama (680MB)

In plain words

Shimmy is a lightweight AI tool that runs locally on your computer, using just 5MB compared to Ollama's 680MB. It prioritizes privacy by keeping all data on your device rather than sending it to external servers. The tool is designed for anyone who wants to run AI models locally without significant storage overhead or concerns about data privacy. It's available as open-source software on GitHub.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

Two 5,200-token runs. Same model. SHA-identical byte output. That's a proof, not a benchmark. Shimmy v2.0 ships Airframe: pure-Rust GPU inference with hand-written WGSL compute shaders. No llama.cpp. No C. No Python. No CUDA. First production GGUF engine Rust all the way down — including the GPU shaders. Run TinyLlama, Llama 3.2, Phi, DeepSeek from GGUF. Drop-in for AnythingLLM, Open WebUI, Cursor, Zed via OpenAI or Ollama API. Windows, macOS, Linux. cargo install shimmy

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