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Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

anthropic.com

31–40 of 61 posts

Re: Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

#33
post #25

So far Anthropic shows remarkable taste in research, engineering, and product. Dario the ideologist attracts the most pure-minded talent in the industry. It indeed looks like Anthropic would be unchallenged for the foreseeable future. It'll be very interesting to see its downfall in 5-20 years.

5-20 years? Have you seen the financials of the AI companies?

Do you have inside information we don't?

Re: Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

#34
post #31

Cool story Dario, call me when Claude supports AGENTS.md.

If you can't prompt Claude to set up a symlink you probably shouldn't be using Claude.

If they can’t prompt Claude to implement such a trivial standard, they probably shouldn’t be proposing standards.

Re: Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

#35

https://xkcd.com/927/ To actually add something to the discussion though: I guess getting LLMs to control robots is cool, but would potentially have more severe consequences than pure software since it interacts more with the physical world

I wonder if there will be an updated xkcd for ai.

Like... don't need standards, just explain to an ai what the target hardware is and it will output binary bits that match.

Re: Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

#37
This contrasts nicely with all the breathless high-profile security incident write-ups:

Our model tricked us, and tried to extort users to achieve its ends! Their model hacked HuggingFace! These things aren't safe!

Anyways, here's a hardware interop protocol for AI we're hoping becomes a standard. Hey look, you can even hook up microscopes!

Re: Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

#38
post #27

The standard makes sense: models work much better when devices expose standardized, machine-readable interfaces. But as far as I can tell, this technical "standard" isn't actually public yet (you have to apply for access to even see or implement it.) Anthropic says they plan to open source it later. Quite a departure from the way foundational hardware standards like USB and CAN were developed. You shouldn't need perm…

USB was developed by a big alliance of major software and hardware vendors. This stuff on the other hand always feels like Anthropic is just scared of dropping out of the news cycle because other companies are constantly releasing models or making them cheaper, while they currently have nothing real to offer themselves. MCP was a complete clusterfuck an announced at a time when OpenAI absolutely dominated with reasoning models while Anthropic's first reasoning model was still months off. The only reason it took off is because noone else bothered to make something better and managers loved it so much that everyone else got dragged on board because of demand.

Re: Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

#39

MCP was a bucket of Not Invented Here nonsense, that ignored years of protocol design. It was incredibly jank and hard to run at any scale, for years and years. They finally looked at how other protocols do things, and made something that behaves in recent versions. But it's hard as heck to take this company at all seriously. The don't really care about ecosystems (AGENTS.md), they don't seem to know think or care mu…

It's literally the "Worse is Better" approach at play here. Yes, same one that OSS and the industry love so much, the same received wisdom that gave us Unix and C, and 40 years of them catching up to what Lisp Machines to do. Talk about a redemption arc.

But can't argue with success: MCP was obvious, skills even more so, but they did throw some half-written spec over the fence to stake the claim - and they were the first to have the right mix of technical simplicity, opennes, and marketing spend behind it, and it got instant adoption, and now we're stuck with the standard.

(The crown still goes to OpenAI though, for standardizing the conversational APIs.)

Re: Previewing the Model Hardware Standard

#40
post #25

So far Anthropic shows remarkable taste in research, engineering, and product. Dario the ideologist attracts the most pure-minded talent in the industry. It indeed looks like Anthropic would be unchallenged for the foreseeable future. It'll be very interesting to see its downfall in 5-20 years.

5-20 years? Have you seen the financials of the AI companies?

Have you seen the progress AI companies are making?

5 years is more than how long this entire market has existed. In 5 years, we may not have stocks anymore.

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