Core AI is Apple's on-device ML runtime in iOS 27 / macOS 27 and the successor to Core ML: PyTorch models are exported with Apple's coreai-torch (LLMs: coreai.llm.export) into .aimodel bundles that run on the GPU or the Neural Engine, e.g. Qwen3-8B 4-bit decodes at 94 tok/s on an M4 Max GPU, MLX 90 under the same protocol (apple-silicon-llm-bench, macOS 27 beta, 2026-06).

MiniCPM5-1B — Core AI (int8, runs on iPhone)

Apple Core AI (.aimodel) conversion of openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B — OpenBMB's 1.08B on-device LLM with hybrid Think / No-Think reasoning and 128K context, reaching 1B-class open-source SOTA. Runs fully on-device on iPhone and Apple Silicon Macs (GPU, pipelined engine).

Part of the community Core AI model zoo: https://github.com/john-rocky/coreai-model-zoo

Use it

⚡ One line — run the kit's task op on this model (import CoreAIOps; no session, no model plumbing, downloads on first use):

let tldr = try await CoreAI.summarize(text, options: .model("minicpm5-1b"))

Every op, one shape — Cookbook.

▶️ Run it (source) — the ChatDemo runner (GUI + CLI, one app for every chat model in the catalog):

git clone https://github.com/john-rocky/coreai-kit
open coreai-kit/Examples/ChatDemo/ChatDemo.xcodeproj
# → Run, then pick "MiniCPM5 1B" in the model picker

# agents / headless (macOS):
cd coreai-kit/Examples/ChatDemo
swift run chat-cli --model minicpm5-1b --prompt "What can you do, offline?"

💻 Build with it — complete; the glue is kit API, copy-paste runs:

import CoreAIKit

let chat = try await ChatSession(catalog: "minicpm5-1b")
let reply = try await chat.respond(to: prompt)
// reply: the answer, generated fully on-device

The take-home is Examples/ChatDemo/Sources/QuickStart.swift — this exact code as one typed function, no UI; the CLI is an argument shell over it, and the GUI drives the same ChatSession across turns for its transcript. Multi-turn? Hold the ChatSession and call respond(to:) per turn — it keeps the conversation history; streamResponse(to:) yields tokens as they decode.

Integration checklist

• SPM: https://github.com/john-rocky/coreai-kit → product CoreAIKit
• Info.plist: none needed
• Entitlements: none needed
• First run downloads the model — 1.1 GB (Mac) / 1.1 GB (iPhone) — then it loads from the local cache (Application Support; progress via the downloadProgress callback)
• Measure in Release — Debug is ~3× slower on per-token host work

On-device numbers (iPhone 17 Pro, A19 Pro)

Measured with the zoo's PipelinedBench (random 128-token prompt, greedy):

int8 is ~2.2× faster than fp16 on iPhone (decode is memory-bandwidth-bound, so halving the weight read ≈ doubles throughput) at no quality cost — the device greedy output is token-for-token identical to the fp32 reference on the benchmark prompts. So int8 strictly dominates fp16 here.

Quantization

Weight-only symmetric per-channel int8 (absmax, no clipping — clipping craters the 130k-vocab LM head; absmax keeps it lossless), applied as a torch pre-export pass via coreai-opt; SDPA / RoPE / RMSNorm stay full precision. Same recipe family as the zoo's proven sym8.

uv run coreai.llm.export openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B --experimental --compute-precision float16 \
  --compression-config minicpm5_int8sym.yaml
# minicpm5_int8sym.yaml: quantization_config → op_state_spec.weight = {dtype: int8,
#   qscheme: symmetric, granularity: {type: per_channel, axis: 0}}

Conversion notes

• llama → mistral remap. MiniCPM5-1B's model_type is llama; the stock exporter has no llama graph family, but Mistral's builder is architecturally identical for this config (GQA, no qkv bias, no qk-norm, explicit head_dim honored). One-line remap in the model registry.
• Chat EOS. Base eos_token is </s>, but the chat template ends turns with <|im_end|> (id 130073). The bundle's tokenizer eos_token is set to <|im_end|> (as Qwen ships) so generation halts cleanly.
• Dynamic-shape bundle → the Core AI pipelined engine (the iPhone path); a static iOS export routes to the static-shape engine instead, which this FM-format bundle doesn't target.

Run

// iOS / macOS, via Foundation Models
import FoundationModels
import CoreAILanguageModels
let model = try await CoreAILanguageModel(resourcesAt: modelURL)   // int8/ bundle
let session = LanguageModelSession(model: model)
print(try await session.respond(to: "Explain on-device AI in one sentence."))

License

Apache-2.0 (upstream MiniCPM5 license). Model © OpenBMB — see https://huggingface.co/openbmb/MiniCPM5-1B. Conversion: community.

---

More models in this format: Core AI Model Zoo — 75 models, each with the recipe that produced it.

Want a different model on-device? Open a request — free, open weights only; the export and its measured numbers get published publicly.