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Apple Core AI Framework
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The 5-second version
- Apple Core AI is a new framework for converting PyTorch models to run across CPU, GPU, and Apple Neural Engine using the .aimodel format.
- Core AI is positioned to replace Core ML for neural networks and transformers, while Core ML is now narrowed to classic non-neural ML like decision trees and tabular models.
- MLX remains a separate research-focused framework for bring-your-own-weights use cases, not intended for end-user deployment.
- Core AI requires macOS 27+ / iOS 27+, so Core ML remains necessary for backward compatibility with older OS versions.
- Apple's documentation lacks a clear feature-parity table between the three frameworks, leaving developers to infer the distinct roles from scattered documentation.
Top voices
Verbatim comments from the thread's most notable / highest-karma participants.
Thanks apfel looks useful! I have been experimenting with Apple's foundation models for almost a year and they are useful for embedded applications. I have been taking a deeper dive into local agentic coding tools (starting with 'little-coder --model ollama/gemma4:12b-it-qat') and I put together a tiny free book with some setup advice that might save people a few minutes of setup time: https://leanpub.com/read/local-coding-agents I have been fairly much pissed off at the "hype in hyperscaler" A…Read on HN ↗
> Even at non VC subsidized $/token prices, its still much cheaper to run cloud based models. On a price-per-wattage level, this is not true, people have done the math on /r/LocalLLaMA many times over[1]. Local models, while not as good as premier models (GPT 5.5, etc.), are like ~80%+ of the way there, and often converge to a similar solution after a few dead ends. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLM/comments/1kshq4f/electrici...Read on HN ↗
fm serve - "Start a Chat Completions API server" chat completion is openai's api surface name. but only when it is actually available we will see if it's a clean drop-in vs. just "chat-completions-ish". one of my learnings from apfel is that is is very easy to get a kinda openAI api compatible server, and a lot of work to get it really totally compatible. sometimes i wonder if even the openai implementation of openai's api is openai api compatible to the core....Read on HN ↗
Those are not GPUs available on iPhones. Will we get there eventually? Maybe! Maybe we end up with GPU clusters built on the edge (e.g. cell towers) for offloading, maybe it’s never economical, maybe a different model architecture makes it simpler, who knows. But it doesn’t seem anywhere imminent with our current world state.Read on HN ↗