seems they planning to replace it but overall now I'm really confused about this and mlx and coremltools. They should do better work explaining the benefits (and cons) of it and any feature parity between coreai, coreml and mlx.
This view is a bit off. First, keep in mind that MLX was and will not be able to access the ANE, so it's a total non-starter for anything user-facing. Based on updates to coreml docs, they're trying to sell CoreML as the tool for tabular or domain-specific applications and CoreAI for NNs moving forward.
- Core ML narrows to classic, non-neural ML (its own docs now point you there for "decision trees or tabular feature engineering")
- Core AI takes neural nets and transformers (the new .aimodel format, the new profiler)
- MLX stays the separate bring-your-own-weights track (its WWDC sessions draw no line back to Core AI at all)
coreai-opt is the successor to coremltools on the optimization side.