Open-Webui

Part 1 established that the model is stateless. Part 2 established that its memory is finite and expensive. Put those together and an awkward question falls out: if the model remembers nothing and can only be handed so much at once, who decides what it gets to see? The answer is the layer you thought was just a chat window. The Layer That Holds Everything the Model Can’t # Open WebUI is a web application. Svelte in the browser, a Python backend, a database on disk. There is no model inside it and no inference happening in it. If Ollama is switched off, Open WebUI still loads perfectly — it simply has nothing to talk to.

Most local AI tutorials hand you a docker compose up and a shrug. This one starts with the architecture, because once you can name the layers, every tutorial after this becomes readable. The Naming Problem # Spend twenty minutes reading about local AI and you will collect a pile of nouns: Ollama. Qwen. Llama. Gemma. GGUF. llama.cpp. Open WebUI. LM Studio. vLLM. Hugging Face.