Mass adoption comes from ease-of-use, which includes ease-of-deployment.
Most of the HN crowd is savvy enough to run HF models directly in their terminal, but there's a reason Ollama, LM Studio, and Faraday are so popular.
Until LLM runners are part of the base OS, methods like this are extremely helpful to reduce friction.
About your question in the third paragraph: This is totally orthogonal to GGUF, and a cursory reading of the README shows that it does uses GGUF. This is not about a new universal LLM format, this is about packing it in a universal executable that runs everywhere, using Cosmopolitan.
Some examples do pack the executable and GGUF weights together in a single file, but that's not dissimilar from an self-executing zip, the only difference is that this executable is not OS-specific, so you can use the same exact binary for macOS or Linux, for example.
Well, it simplifies things when you don't need to compile things.
Also, you literally can't download or compile the wrong binary by mistake, it's the same binary for all supported processor/OSes Cartesian product matrix.
> Why introduce one more container?
It makes stuff more convenient.
`application/zip` is also a ubiquitous standard. I doubt anyone is being "introduced to it".
I also appreciate the fact that tooling for handling `application/zip` is very widespread, so you don't need totally bespoke tooling to retrieve the models from inside a `llamafile`.
> Who benefits from binary distribution of this sort?
Anyone that doesn't have a compiler SDK on their computer.
And of course, I can imagine where the whole cosmopolitan thing comes from,... even as manifest of sorts for the idea of systems-neutrality and potentially gender fluidity. But I really wonder whether GGUF actually needs this, since llama.cpp already compiles and runs pretty much everywhere.
Why introduce one more container? Who benefits from binary distribution of this sort?