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AI · May 3, 2024

Swift-powered AI apps on iOS: Real-time multimodal semantic search

I was recently playing with Apple's CoreML and had several painful observations on tooling. It's not enough for a long read but should be for an HN post. In short, you can take a simple BERT-like encoder model in PyTorch, convert it into an f32 CoreML checkpoint, and run it on CPU or GPU, but not NPU. Let's unpack this. Having a simple and extensible format to exchange common ANN architectures is a big issue for anyone who uses more than one framework or programming language to run the same model. ONNX is the closest we have to that standard, but it's hard to call anything Protobuf-related…

Swift-powered AI apps on iOS: Real-time multimodal semantic search launched on May 3, 2024 with 6 votes, #1,748 of 4,539 launches that month and more than 50% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 2 years on.

What it does

In the maker’s words, at launch

I was recently playing with Apple's CoreML and had several painful observations on tooling. It's not enough for a long read but should be for an HN post. In short, you can take a simple BERT-like encoder model in PyTorch, convert it into an f32 CoreML checkpoint, and run it on CPU or GPU, but not NPU. Let's unpack…

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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part

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