Preface

Why use Swift for hacking AI? Common Lisp has been my go-to language for artificial intelligence development and research since 1982. The transition to using Swift was a transition motivated by practical aspects of Swift and the Swift ecosystem.

Notes on the new June 2025 Book Edition

With the release of new Apple Intelligence tooling available for macOS26, iPadOS26, and iOS26 I have added a new Part 5 at the end of this book covering several practical AI use cases with new examples.

Requests from the Author

This book will always be available to read free online at https://leanpub.com/SwiftAI/read.

That said, I appreciate it when readers purchase my books because the income enables me to spend more time writing.

Hire the Author as a Consultant

I am available for short consulting projects. Please see https://markwatson.com.

You can also interact with me on social media on Mastodon and Twitter.

Notes on the Second Edition

The second edition of this book deletes some of the old material and adds two new themes:

  • A new Part II of the book that covers Large Language Models (LLMS). We will use both commercial LLM APIs and running local LLMs using Ollama and Apple’s MLX framework.
  • Several examples from the first edition are augmented using LLMs.
  • As much as possible, I support some of the book examples as Swift Playgrounds, usable on iPads and Macs.

Book Structure

This book starts out slowly in Part I with simple examples which I wrote showing how to access the Swift library packages on GitHub, tips on writing Swift command line apps.

Part II will show you how to effectively integrate LLMs into your own applications.

Part III starts with a simple example using web scraping and commercial web search APIs. We then work through examples integrating web search with LLMs and then show how we can modify web scraping applications to specifically process topics and have better control of outputing structured data.

We then proceed to using Apple’s CoreML for Natural Language Processing (NLP), training and using your own CoreML models, using OpenAI’s GPT-4 APIs, and finally several semantic web/linked data examples. The book ends with the example macOS application Knowledge Graph Navigator. It is not my intention to cover in detail the use of SwiftUI for building iOS/iPadOS/macOS applications but I thought my readers might enjoy seeing several of the techniques covered in the book integrated into an example app.

I have used Common Lisp for AI research projects and for AI product development and delivery since 1982. There is something special about using a language for almost forty years. I now find Swift a compelling choice for several reasons:

  • Flexible language with many features I rely on like supporting closures and an interactive functional programming style.
  • Built-in support for deep learning neural network models for natural language processing, predictive models, etc.
  • First class support for iOS and macOS development.
  • Good support for server side applications hosted on Linux.

Swift is a programmer-efficient language: code is concise and easy to read, and high quality libraries from Apple and third parties mean that often there is less code to write. I will share with you my Swift development work flow that combines interactive development of code in playgrounds, development of higher level libraries in text only or command line applications, and my general strategy for writing iOS and macOS applications after low level and intermediate code is written and debugged.

Requests from the Author

This book will always be available to read free online at https://leanpub.com/SwiftAI/read.

That said, I appreciate it when readers purchase my books because the income enables me to spend more time writing.

Hire the Author as a Consultant

I am available for short consulting projects. Please see https://markwatson.com.

Parts of this Book are Specific for macOS and iOS, with Some Support for Linux

Swift is a general purpose language that is well supported in macOS, iOS, and Linux, with some support in Windows. Here, we cover the use of Swift on macOS and iOS. Some of the examples in this book rely on libraries that are specifically available on macOS and iOS like CoreML and the NLP libraries. Several book examples also work on Linux, such as the examples using SQLite, the Microsoft Azure search APIs, web scraping, and semantic web/linked data.

Code for this Book

Because of the way the Swift Package Manager works, I organized all book examples that build libraries as separate GitHub repos so the libraries can be easily used in other book examples as well as your own software projects. The separate library GitHub repositories are:

I suggest cloning all of these GitHub repositories right now so you can have the example source code at hand while reading this book.

All of the code examples are licensed using the Apache 2 license. You are free to reuse the book example code in your own projects (open source, commercial), with attribution of my copyright and the Apache 2 license.

Except for the last SwiftUI example application, all sample programs are written as command line utilities. I considered using Swift playgrounds for some of the examples but decided that packaging as a combination of libraries and command line utilities would tend to make the example code more useful for your own projects.

http://www.knowledgegraphnavigator.com/

Author’s Background

I have written 20+ books, mostly about artificial intelligence. I have over 50 US patents.

I write about technologies that I have used throughout my career: knowledge representation using semantic web and linked data, machine learning and deep learning, and natural language processing. I am grateful for the companies where I have worked (SAIC, Google, Capital One, Olive AI, Babylist, etc.) that have supported this work since 1982.

As an author, I hope that the material in this book entertains you and will be useful in your work.

Cover Art

The cover picture was taken by WikiMedia Commons user Keta and is available for use under the Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.5.

CoreML Libraries Used in this Book

  • CoreML general overview: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml
  • MLClassifier https://developer.apple.com/documentation/createml/mlclassifier
  • MLTextClassifier https://developer.apple.com/documentation/createml/mltextclassifier
  • NLModel https://developer.apple.com/documentation/naturallanguage/nlmodel
  • Natural Language Framework https://developer.apple.com/documentation/naturallanguage
  • MLCustomLayer https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coreml/mlcustomlayer

Swift 3rd Party Libraries

We use the following 3rd party libraries:

Acknowledgements

I thank my wife Carol for editing this manuscript, finding typos, and suggesting improvements.

Up next

Part 1: Introduction and Short Examples