The single biggest source of confusion in Morpheus: the local demo model is not a Morpheus model. Two things are easily conflated.

​
TL;DR

​
How to know which one you’re using

​
In MorpheusUI

Look at the model selector at the top of the Chat screen. If it says “Local Model” you are talking to the bundled llama.cpp server on localhost:8080. If it says a real model name like LMR-OpenAI-GPT-4o, you are spending MOR.

​
Via the API

If you are sending prompts to /v1/chat/completions without a session_id header, you are routed to the local backend. With a session_id header, you are routed to the provider that opened that session. See API direct.

​
Why the local model exists

It exists only to prove the stack works end-to-end without spending money. The bundled tinyllama is a 1B-parameter demonstration model — it will hallucinate, fail simple tasks, and produce inconsistent output. Comparing its quality to a real Morpheus provider is not a fair comparison.

​
When to use what

Use the local model

First-run validation. Smoke testing the pipeline. Demos without a wallet.

Use a Morpheus model

Anything you actually care about. Real workloads. Apps. Agents.
See also Why is my MOR locked? and Local vs blockchain models (anti-hallucination) for an LLM-focused version of this page.