explaingit

john-rocky/coreai-model-zoo

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

112SwiftAudience · developerSetup · hard

TLDR

CoreAI-Model-Zoo is a community collection of AI language models converted to run natively and locally on Apple devices using Apple's new Core AI framework.

Mindmap

A visual breakdown will appear here once this repo is fully enriched.

Code map

Detail Auto

An interactive map of this repo's files and how they connect — its source is parsed live in your browser. Click Visualize to build it.

filefunction / class

What do people build with it?

USE CASE 1

Download a converted .aimodel bundle and run an AI language model locally on an iPhone or Mac.

USE CASE 2

Compare measured decode speeds across GPU and Neural Engine for different model sizes on Apple hardware.

USE CASE 3

Use the companion CoreAIChat app to try models without writing any code.

What is it built with?

SwiftCore AIMetalHugging Face

How does it compare?

john-rocky/coreai-model-zooapple/foundation-models-utilitiesomarshahine/homeclaw
Stars112117120
LanguageSwiftSwiftSwift
Setup difficultyhardeasyeasy
Complexity2/5
Audiencedeveloperdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you get it running?

Difficulty · hard Time to first run · 1h+

Requires an iOS 27 or macOS 27 beta device, since .aimodel is only supported in those beta SDKs.

In plain English

CoreAI-Model-Zoo is a community collection of AI language models that have been converted to run natively on Apple devices using Apple's Core AI framework, which is part of iOS 27 and macOS 27. Core AI is Apple's successor to their earlier Core ML format, and models in this format run locally on the device without sending data to an external server. The repository hosts converted versions of models from several families, including Qwen3.5, Gemma 4, GLM-4.7, Granite, and LFM2.5, in sizes ranging from under 1 billion parameters to 35 billion. Each model is available for download from Hugging Face as an .aimodel bundle. Smaller models like Qwen3.5-0.8B run on iPhone, while the larger ones require a Mac with Apple Silicon. The README includes measured decode speeds in tokens per second for each model on an iPhone 17 Pro (both GPU and Apple Neural Engine) and on an M4 Max Mac. Some of the included models required custom Metal shaders to run at all or to run at practical speeds. The Gemma 4 12B and 31B models crash with Apple's stock attention implementation on long sequences due to a memory overflow bug in the GPU scheduler, so the project ships a custom flash-decode kernel for those layers. The MoE (mixture-of-experts) models received a custom kernel that reads only the active expert weights rather than the full weight matrix, which gave a 3.6x speed improvement for one of the models. A companion iPhone and Mac app called CoreAIChat is included that lets you download and run the models without building any code. It requires an iOS 27 or macOS 27 beta device, since the .aimodel bundle format is only available in those beta SDKs. The repository also includes a knowledge base covering conversion steps, common pitfalls, how compute unit selection affects speed, and the custom kernel implementations. Vision-language models that handle both images and text are included alongside text-only models and an embedding model suited for on-device search.

Copy-paste prompts

Prompt 1
Show me how to download a Qwen3.5-0.8B .aimodel bundle and run it on iPhone using CoreAI-Model-Zoo.
Prompt 2
Explain how the custom flash-decode Metal kernel fixes the Gemma 4 memory overflow crash.
Prompt 3
Compare decode speeds between the M4 Max and iPhone 17 Pro for models in this repository.
Prompt 4
Walk me through converting a new model to the .aimodel format using this project's knowledge base.

Frequently asked questions

What is coreai-model-zoo?

CoreAI-Model-Zoo is a community collection of AI language models converted to run natively and locally on Apple devices using Apple's new Core AI framework.

What language is coreai-model-zoo written in?

Mainly Swift. The stack also includes Swift, Core AI, Metal.

How hard is coreai-model-zoo to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated hard, with roughly 1h+ to a first successful run.

Who is coreai-model-zoo for?

Mainly developer.

Open on GitHub → Explain another repo

This repo across BitVibe Labs

Verify against the repo before relying on details.