Ollama: Thinking Streams and Local Tool Power-ups
The Ollama team delivered three solid improvements focusing on AI streaming capabilities and local model empowerment. ParthSareen tackled the complex challenge of properly splitting mixed thinking streams in OpenAI compatibility, while Eva H unlocked web search capabilities for local tool-enabled models, removing cloud-only restrictions.
Duration: PT3M59S
Episode overview
This episode is a short developer briefing from Ollama.
It explains recent repository work in plain language.
- Show: Ollama
- Published: 2026-03-12T10:06:42Z
- Audio duration: PT3M59S
Transcript excerpt
This excerpt keeps the crawler page concise. Listen to the episode or use the RSS feed for the full update.
Hey there, code crafters! Welcome back to another episode of the Ollama podcast. I'm your host, and wow, do we have some thoughtful improvements to dig into today from March 11th. Grab your favorite beverage because we're talking about some really clever problem-solving that happened in the codebase.
Let's jump right into our main story today, and it's all about making AI interactions smoother and more powerful. We had three merged pull requests that really show the team thinking deeply about user experience and capability expansion.
First up, ParthSareen tackled something that sounds simple but is actually quite nuanced - splitting mixed thinking stream chunks in the OpenAI compatibility layer. Now, if you've worked with streaming AI responses, you know that sometimes you get this mix of the AI's "thinking" process along with actual content or…
Next, Eva H delivered something I'm really excited about - enabling local tool models to perform web searches. Before this change, web search was locked behind a cloud-model-only guard in the Anthropic middleware. Eva simply removed those artificial barriers, and now your local models with tool support can search…
Our third merge came from…
Wha…
Nearby episodes from Ollama
- The Caching Revolution
- Bug Squashing and Launch Improvements
- Launch Command Gets a Major Polish
- Spring Cleaning and Performance Gains
- Stability First - Error Handling and Performance Fixes
- MLX Gets a Major Upgrade and Web Search Goes Live
- Simplifying the Sampling Story
- Cloud Models Get Smarter & Build Performance Boost