Open Model Explorer

A local chatbot harness for exploring open foundational and medical LLMs — pick a model, chat with it, compare two side by side, upload medical images, and add any model from Hugging Face live. Everything runs on your Mac via Ollama; nothing leaves the device.

Works with text (example above) or images (animated example below).

What it does

• Clean white chat UI at http://localhost:8000
• Model picker grouped into Medical and General, with 👁 vision and ⚡ fast icons and ✓ installed / ⬇ pull badges
• Streaming responses with a live tokens/sec readout under each answer
• Compare mode — run two models side by side on the same prompt
• Image upload for vision models (up to 3 images; PNG, JPG, WEBP, GIF, BMP, TIFF; ≤ 10 MB each) with in-browser normalization to lossless PNG
• "Add model from Hugging Face" — paste any hf.co/... GGUF repo and watch it pull live, then it appears in the picker
• Clinical example prompts on the welcome screen; persistent research-use disclaimer

Requirements

• macOS on Apple Silicon (tuned for ~32 GB; runs 7–9B models comfortably)
• Ollama — install with brew install ollama
• Python 3.9+
• Internet access for the first model pulls and for TIFF decoding (UTIF.js via CDN)

Run it

cd "Open Research"
chmod +x run.sh      # first time only
./run.sh

run.sh verifies Ollama, starts its server if needed, creates a Python venv, installs dependencies, pre-pulls the demo models, launches the app (with auto-reload), and opens your browser. First run downloads the demo models (a few minutes); later runs are fast.

To stop: press Ctrl+C in the terminal.

Files

File	Purpose
server.py	FastAPI backend — proxies Ollama for chat, model list, and HF pulls
index.html	The white single-page chat UI (all HTML/CSS/JS in one file)
models.json	Curated model catalog + which models to pre-pull
run.sh	One-command launcher
requirements.txt	Python dependencies
.gitignore	Excludes .venv/, caches, and any future secret files
LICENSE	MIT license

Featured models

Medical: MedGemma 4B (vision), OpenBioLLM 8B, BioMistral 7B, Meditron 7B. General: Pixtral 12B (vision, Mistral), Llama 3.2 Vision 11B, Gemma 3 4B (vision), LLaVA 7B, Moondream, Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, Gemma 2 9B, Phi-3 Mini, Llama 3.2 3B.

Default model is Gemma 3 4B (multimodal — text + image). Pre-pulled on first run: phi3:mini, BioMistral 7B, MedGemma, and Gemma 3 4B (see models.json → preload).

Security & credentials

This app does not store, read, or transmit any Hugging Face token or API key.

• Model pulls go through your local Ollama, which downloads public GGUF repos from Hugging Face without authentication. Your personal HF login (if any) lives in Ollama/HF config outside this repo (~/.ollama, ~/.cache/huggingface) and is never committed.
• The only environment variable the server reads is OLLAMA_HOST (defaults to http://localhost:11434) — not a secret.
• The repo has been checked for embedded tokens/secrets: none are present, and .gitignore guards against accidentally committing .env or token files later.

If you ever add a gated HF model (some require accepting a license), Ollama needs an HF token. Set it as an environment variable on your own machine — never hardcode it:

export HF_TOKEN=hf_xxxxxxxx   # in your shell profile, not in this repo

The app itself still needs no changes; Ollama handles the auth.

Clinical disclaimer: These open models are research/demo tools only and are not validated for clinical use. They must not inform patient-care decisions. Uploaded images are re-encoded to 8-bit for the models — this is exploration, not diagnostic-grade viewing of 16-bit or whole-slide scans.

Try It!

1. Open the app — select one (or two) open models for testing from the drop down list(s).
2. Send a clinical prompt to a medical model, e.g. "What are first-line treatments for stage 2 hypertension?", and note the tokens/sec readout.
3. Turn on Compare, put MedGemma 4B vs. Llama 3.1 8B on the same question — contrast a medical fine-tune against a general baseline.
4. Attach a medical image (chest X-ray / histology) and compare MedGemma 4B (vision) vs. Llama 3.2 Vision — the medical grounding shows.
5. Click + Add model from Hugging Face, paste hf.co/EnlistedGhost/Pixtral-12B-Ollama-GGUF, and watch the model being pulled from HF live.