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Comment by daniel_iversen | Hacker News Reader

Is this Apple encouraging developers to go through their api abstraction layer to use LLMs so that when they launch their own (which I think we’ve heard they’ve been spending lots of money on training and might be somehow involved with Siri or current Apple AI?) that they can easily help devs make a seamless transition? Or is it just a developer nicety or something else?

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Apple has some clever mechanics to protect user data. I had to work with App tracking stuff lately and their approach to keeping user details private with anonymized cohorts (SKAN, Differential Privacy) before reporting tracking events to third party platforms was surprisingly well thought out. There is value in having them in your loop if you care about privacy.

My read of the ATT stuff is basically that it forced all the apps to use meta ad tracking because they’re the only ones who figured out how to serve relevant ads despite it.

Figured out = do the forbidden PII join anyway with their partners in “clean rooms”.

Right, the lesson here is that if you make rules with exploitable loopholes youre probably only going to end up strengthening malicious actors who are willing to exploit loopholes.

It would be cool if they offered some kind of prompt sanitation option.

This is support for a new framework that ships with reality/mac/iPad/watch/tv/iOS 27 (and that they've promised to open-source later in the year, so presumably you'll also be able to lean on this if you ship Swift on your backend).

The framework's whole deal is that it lets you use the same API to target either the device built-in models, the Apple-hosted online models (Private Cloud Computer), or write your own shims to call out to arbitrarily hosted online models.

You can then dynamically route your calls to a different kind of model/provider, using system APIs, without having to write your own abstraction layer over "I want to use local model for this, but I want to use Claude for that", or having to integrate your own API integration with Anthropic/OpenAI APIs.

It abstracts things like tool calling in one place; and has a bunch of other niceties/oddities (it keeps the same "transcript" going, even if you dynamically switch providers/models during a session) and some other things.

The cynic (or realist?) in my thinks this abstraction layer is Apple's way of making sure that users give their own Apple Intelligence credit for the underlying LLM functionality, even if another company is actually providing the LLM.

Assembled in Cupertino once more. ;)

Yeah, Apple just designs and writes the SoC, CPU, graphics unit, neural unit, compiler (Swift), OS, graphics layer, 3D API, core libs from graphics to persistence, filesystem, broadband chip, and a few more things besides...

Notably good models are not on that list.

AI models in the end are just commodities the computer using public is not going to pay for them directly, in short, they’re not gonna bail out OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic.

Neither are other capex heavy items like chip fabs.

Yeah, they also don't mine their own steel and copper. Such mere assemblers!

Yeah, that totally makes them merely assemblers then /s

Apple Silicon is broadly unused for LLM training. Arguably, Apple isn't even helping to assemble real-world AI models, just the thin client hardware.

This is clearly because they plan to monetise AI in the future, and they don't want competition.

They have competition, Microsoft and Nvidia, Google and Huawei long term…

A dark, but not totally unfair take: It makes it easier for Apple to take payment for the models others provide, and even allows Apple, if they want to, to use the data to build a dataset for training their own models based on how users use third party models. It's only on Apple devices this API is used, so they split up the market by not letting developers use the same system if they want things to work on iOS, locking users even more in.

From the linked docs page:

> Requests go directly from your app to the Claude API; Apple is not in the request path and does not see prompts or responses. Usage is billed to your Anthropic account at standard API pricing. Your app decides when to use Claude and when to use Apple's on-device model: pass whichever model you want to each session.

Call it Intelligence Store and charge… wait for it… 30%.

This is genuinely the only way Apple will make it out of the intelligence era alive and not become the next IBM

There are already on-device models that you can use through this framework as a developer. Claude would just be an additional one.

Maybe they plan to have the providers pay for being the default model? So basically, what Google is doing right now for search engines. The difference however is that Google is making money with additional search requests while AIs are (as of now) losing money with additional requests. I don't see the business case for them yet though.

> which I think we’ve heard they’ve been spending lots of money on training and might be somehow involved with Siri or current Apple AI

Lol bro this is literally it this is the model they've been training (was Apple Foundation model not a big enough hint?)

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