Previewing the Model Hardware Standard(anthropic.com) |
Previewing the Model Hardware Standard(anthropic.com) |
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 permission to read a standard.
Yes, and that alone is sufficient reason for them to do it. They did it with MCP. They did it with Skills. OpenAI did it with tools. All of these had many months, sometimes even years, of existing prior art. All of these could've been done much better, too. But "worse is better", first one to get a properly packaged MVP out the door and into spotlight wins, and then everyone is using that.
https://joearms.github.io/published/2016-01-28-A-Badass-Way-...
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 much about protocols until they have to (MCP's incredibly long redemption ark). The vibes are all off.
Maybe they avoid laying their own pitfalls this time. Maybe it's better. It'd be nice to start seeing some kind of cause to trust this company as vaguely capable computer-using people. But so far that hasn't been the case.
It's like creating conditions for a race where they structurally have months of advance. And realistically they have a credible shot at establishing the standard due to their weight in the industry, and control of the most popular AI distribution method (Claude).
So they create the race, knowing the race is what will likely establish the standard, and using some pretext to prevent other competitive athletes from training for it in advance. Other athletes only get to start when the gun fires.
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.)
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!
Nitpick: it’s annoying that they add Model to those acronyms, for what seems like a fairly universal software interface
Why another 15th standard.
This is how I understand it:
Agent <-> MCP/CLI/code <-> MHS <-> vendor API/SCPI/OPC UA/ROS/etc <-> CAN/Modbus/USB/etc <-> hardware
MHS can describe capabilites, metadata, safety limits, as well as provide read/write control and discovery. Things like "can measure temperature", "arm weighs X kg", "never exceed X RPM", that agents can easily understand. (as opposed to that being buried in a datasheet somewhere, or having to be included in the prompt)
Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPC_Unified_Architecture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_in_Lab_Automat..., 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
Like... don't need standards, just explain to an ai what the target hardware is and it will output binary bits that match.
Have you seen the financials of the AI companies?
5 years is more than how long this entire market has existed. In 5 years, we may not have stocks anymore.
- EPICS
- TANGO
- Bluesky (not that one)
- QCodes
- Sardana
- yaq
Anthropic seem to be creating the n+1 version of those packages and presumably doing some harness work to make Claude good at using it.
The whole text reads like everything is just a gRPC call that could've also been implemented with an MCP based wrapper.
The caveat is that actual utility of this particular command set isn't clear yet. Or how many LLM labs will find it worthwhile.
Guess what's really good/quick at translating things?