Quick tip: Running OpenAI's Swarm locally using Ollama

Abstract

This short article shows how to integrate OpenAI's Swarm with Ollama without requiring direct OpenAI access, enabling efficient, scalable AI workflows using alternative large language models.

The notebook file used in this article is available on GitHub.

Introduction

In a previous article, we used OpenAI's Swarm, but required an OpenAI API Key and use of an OpenAI large language model. However, Swarm can be easily configured to use Ollama and alternative large language models. In this article, we'll see how.

Installing Ollama is quick and easy. On Linux, for example, we can use the following command:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

With Ollama installed and running, we'll launch Jupyter locally:

jupyter notebook

Fill out the notebook

We'll then create a new notebook and first install the following:

!pip install git+https://github.com/openai/swarm.git --quiet
!pip install ollama openai --quiet

Next, we'll import the following:

import ollama

from openai import OpenAI

and then download a model using Ollama:

model = "llama3.2:1b"

ollama.pull(model)

Ollama can be configured to provide OpenAI compatibility, as follows:

ollama_client = OpenAI(
    base_url = "http://localhost:11434/v1",
    api_key = "ollama"
)

As a quick example, we'll slightly modify the Swarm demo provided by OpenAI on GitHub:

from swarm import Swarm, Agent

client = Swarm(ollama_client)

def transfer_to_agent_b():
    return agent_b

agent_a = Agent(
    name = "Agent A",
    model = model,
    instructions = "You are a helpful agent.",
    functions=[transfer_to_agent_b],
)

agent_b = Agent(
    name = "Agent B",
    model = model,
    instructions = "Only speak in Haikus.",
)

response = client.run(
    agent = agent_a,
    messages = [{"role": "user", "content": "I want to talk to agent B."}],
)

print(response.messages[-1]["content"])

In the code, we've:

1. Changed client = Swarm() to client = Swarm(ollama_client)
2. Added model = model to both agents

And that's it!

Summary

In this short article, we've quickly and easily configured OpenAI's Swarm to run locally using Ollama.