OpenIntelligence

Documentation status: Verified for OpenIntelligence v4.4 on June 28, 2026. Scope: Describes shipped behavior for on-device Apple Intelligence RAG architecture.

Local-first document intelligence for macOS and iOS, featuring an entirely on-device Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline and native Apple Foundation Models integration.

OpenIntelligence is an exploratory, privacy-obsessed document query assistant built natively for Apple platforms. It demonstrates that production-grade document ingestion, vector indexing, lexical retrieval, and generative AI can run entirely on device without sacrificing privacy or relying on third-party cloud wrappers.

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📚 Rigorous Engineering Documentation

OpenIntelligence is backed by extensive, rigorous engineering documentation detailing how reliable, hallucination-resistant on-device RAG is achieved using Apple's 4K-token local context windows.

Core Architecture & Systems

• System Architecture: The high-level view of the decoupled import-time and query-time pipelines.
• Retrieval Pipeline (RETRIEVAL_PIPELINE.md): Deep dive into the hybrid search engine (BM25 + Core ML Vector) and Reciprocal Rank Fusion implementation.
• Ingestion Pipeline (INGESTION_PIPELINE.md): Details of the semantic chunker, local Vision OCR fallbacks, and NLP metadata extraction.
• Privacy & Routing (PRIVACY_AND_ROUTING.md): Strict local-first data guarantees, local cache layouts, and routing protocols.

Apple Intelligence Engineering Specs

• Apple Foundation Models Specs: Optimization guide for macOS/iOS 26.x/27, managing 4K token budgets, guided generation via @Generable, and SystemLanguageModel sessions.
• Apple Document Intelligence: Practical integration with Vision OCR, SFSpeechRecognizer, PDFKit, and CoreText for semantic document parsing.
• Private Cloud Compute (PCC): Analysis of Apple's PCC enclave constraints, secure remote processing, and native execution routing layers.

Audits & Constraints

• Hard Limits: A centralized reference for token boundaries, model caps, memory limitations, and platform bottlenecks.
• Current State & Gaps: Analysis of local inference latency, context packing, and model capability gaps.
• Evaluation Framework: Detailed verification procedures using scripts/run_rag_benchmarks.py to assert extraction accuracy and similarity scores.

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⚙️ Technical Architecture Overview

The runtime operates in two decoupled phases:

flowchart TD
  subgraph INGEST["Import-Time Pipeline"]
    A1["Import Files"]
    A2["Extract & Normalize (Vision OCR)"]
    A3["Semantic Chunking"]
    A4["Build FTS5 & BNNS Vector Indexes"]
    A1 --> A2 --> A3 --> A4
  end

  subgraph QUERY["Query-Time Pipeline"]
    B1["User Query"]
    B2["Analyze Intent & HyDE Expansion"]
    B3["Hybrid Retrieval & RRF Merge"]
    B4["Cross-Encoder Reranking"]
    B5["Verification Gates"]
    B6["Generative LLM Response"]
    B1 --> B2 --> B3 --> B4 --> B5 --> B6
  end

  A4 --> B3

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🧠 Quality Modes & Inference Routing

The entire RAG architecture operates on a strict 29-Step Pipeline (6 Ingestion steps + 23 Query Loop steps). To handle complex queries, the query loop routes dynamically across three agentic modes and foundation models:

3 Agentic Quality Modes

• Standard: Executes the 23-step query loop sequentially for maximum speed and battery life.
• Deep Think: Actively loops the retrieval agent through 4-10 concurrent reasoning sessions until it hits 98% confidence (scales dynamically based on device thermal state).
• Maximum: Removes the 8-session ceiling, granting the orchestrator an unlimited budget to recursively hunt down answers up to 50 loops.

3 Foundation Model Routes

• 3B Core: Offline Apple Silicon model (SystemLanguageModel.default) executing standard query tasks.
• 20B Advanced: Offline Apple Silicon model leveraging unified memory and NAND Flash Paging for enhanced reasoning.
• Private Cloud Compute (PT-MoE): Escalates over encrypted channels to Apple's 32K context secure server enclaves. Integrates native FoundationModels.PrivateCloudComputeLanguageModel execution when running on iOS 27 / macOS 27+, falling back cleanly to local SystemLanguageModel simulation on older OS versions.

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🗺️ Codebase Map

Module	Core Files	Responsibility
Ingestion	DocumentProcessor.swift, LayoutAwareExtractor.swift	Document content extraction, Vision OCR fallback, semantic structure recovery.
Chunking	SemanticChunker.swift, ContentTaggingService.swift	Context-aware document chunking, entity resolution, NLP metadata enrichment.
Indexing	SQLiteFullTextService.swift, BNNSVectorDatabase.swift	SQLite FTS5 lexical storage and local BNNS-accelerated vector indexing.
Retrieval	HybridSearchService.swift, ContextPackingService.swift	BM25 + Vector hybrid merging, parent-chunk reconstruction, exact token packing.
Orchestration	LLMService.swift, RAGService.swift	Execution coordination with the local SystemLanguageModel and evaluation loops.
Evidence Threads	EvidenceThread.swift, EvidenceThreadStore.swift	Thread-safe local persistence of conversational research queries and verification results.
Diagnostics	EvidenceThreadDebugService.swift, EvidenceThreadDebugView.swift	Developer-only view and helper service to test local persistent store integrity.
Shortcuts	RAGAppIntents.swift, ScreenAwarenessIntents.swift, VisualIntelligenceIntents.swift	Siri voice integration and entity-native App Intents (16 active actions) resolving in-process via presented activeInstance binding.

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🛠️ Placeholders & Scaffolding Warnings

To maintain codebase transparency, please note:

• Core AI Integration: Fully integrated and registered via CoreAISentenceEmbeddingProvider.swift. Runs zero-copy Silicon-native sentence embeddings on iOS 27+ / macOS 27+ compatible devices, automatically falling back to the standard CoreMLSentenceEmbeddingProvider on older targets.
• Private Cloud Compute (PCC): Routed locally using a fallback system language model wrapper in EngineSDKCompatibility.swift to ensure compilability on current public SDKs.
• iCloud Sync: Sync utilizes iCloud Drive ubiquity containers (NSFileCoordinator and NSMetadataQuery). The app does not utilize CloudKit databases.
• Pro Tier Document Limit: Document uploads are restricted to a hard quota of 1,000 documents under the Pro tier. Unlimited uploads are restricted to the Lifetime tier.
• Evidence Thread Synchronization: Thread history JSON arrays are stored under Application Support/EvidenceThreads/<containerId>/ and are synchronized bidirectionally across devices via WorkspaceSyncService in iCloud Drive, gated by tier-specific limits (5 Free / 20 Pro / Unlimited Lifetime).

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🚀 Build & Verification

Requirements

• macOS Tahoe (26.x) with Xcode 26+
• iOS 26.0+ SDK target support
• Apple Silicon (M1+ / A17 Pro+) for adequate Neural Engine throughput

Instructions

1. Clear macOS extended attributes to prevent codesign failure:

   /usr/bin/xattr -cr /Users/gunnarhostetler/Documents/GitHub/OpenIntelligence

2. Compile the simulator smoke target:

   ./scripts/build_simulator_smoke.sh

3. Execute the local RAG pipeline validation harness:

   python3 scripts/run_rag_benchmarks.py

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License

OpenIntelligence is open-source software. See LICENSE for details.