On the Slow Death of Scaling

Mike's Notes

These data centres are very inefficient power users. The AI models are wasteful. As a result, I can see working people's power bills rising, causing more suffering.

This is a great article.

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  • Hooker, Sara, On the Slow Death of Scaling (December 06, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5877662 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5877662

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Last Updated

04/02/2026

On the Slow Death of Scaling

By: Sara Hooker
SSRN: 6/12/2025

Adaption Research Scientist.

Abstract

For the last decade, it has been hard to stray off the beaten path of accepted wisdom for what drives innovation. We have been held hostage to a painfully simple formula: scale model size and training data. A pervasive belief in scaling has resulted in a massive windfall in capital for industry labs and fundamentally reshaped the culture of conducting science in our field. Academia has been marginalized from meaningfully participating in AI progress and industry labs have stopped publishing. Yet, this essay will posit that the relationship between training compute and performance is highly uncertain and rapidly changing. Relying on scaling alone misses a critical shift that is underway, and ignores more interesting levers of progress. All this suggests that key disruptions lie ahead.

1 How we got here.

Estimated training cost of select AI models, 2016–23
Source: Epoch, 2023 | Chart: 2024 AI Index report

Training cost (in U.S. dollars - log scale)

Publication date

Figure 1: Estimated training cost of select AI models (Maslej et al., 2024). The last decade has been characterized by an explosion in the size of models and cost of participating at the frontier of research.

Many inventions are re-purposed for means unintended by their designers. Initially, the magnetron tube was developed for radar technology during World War II. In 1945, a self-taught American engineer, Percy Spencer, noticed that a chocolate bar melted in his pocket whenever he was close to a radar set. This innocuous discovery resulted in the patent for the first microwave (Zhang, 2017). In a similar vein, deep neural networks only began to work when an existing technology was unexpectedly re-purposed.

A graphical processing unit (GPU) was originally introduced in the 1970s as a specialized accelerator for video games and for developing graphics for movies and animation. In the 2000s, like the magnetron tube, GPUs were re-purposed for an entirely unimagined use case – to train deep neural networks (Chellapilla et al., 2006; Hooker, 2021b; Oh & Jung, 2004; Payne et al., 2005).

GPUs had one critical advantage over CPUs - they were far better at parallelizing matrix multiplication (Brodtkorb et al., 2013; Dettmers, 2023), a mathematical operation which dominates the definition of deep neural network layers (Fawzi et al., 2022; Davies et al., 2024). This higher number of floating operation points per second (FLOP/s) combined with the clever distribution of training between GPUs unblocked the training of deeper networks. The depth of the network turned out to be critical. Performance on ImageNet jumped with ever deeper networks in 2011 (Ciresan et al., 2011), 2012 (Krizhevsky et al., 2012) and 2015 (Szegedy et al., 2014). A striking example of this jump in compute is a comparison of the now famous 2012 Google paper which used 16,000 CPU cores to classify cats (Le et al., 2012) to a paper published a mere year later that solved the same task with only two CPU cores and four GPUs (Coates et al., 2013).

This would ignite a rush for compute which has led to a bigger-is-better race in the number of model parameters over the last decade (Canziani et al., 2016; Strubell et al., 2019b; Rae et al., 2021; Raffel et al., 2020; Bommasani et al., 2021; Bender et al., 2021). The computer scientist Ken Thompson famously said “When in doubt, use brute force.” This was formalized as the “bitter lesson” by Rich Sutton who posited that computer science history tells us that throwing more compute at a problem has consistently outperformed all attempts to leverage human knowledge of a domain to teach a model (Sutton, 2019). In a punch to the ego of every computer scientist out there, what Sutton is saying is that symbolic methods that codify human knowledge have not worked as well as letting a model learn patterns for itself coupled with ever-vaster amounts of compute.

This essay will ask: is bigger always better? For the last decade, computer science progress has been caught by our own Moore’s law (Schaller, 1997) of a painfully simple formula for innovation by adding more model parameters and data to training. Yet, this essay will posit it is far from clear that future innovation or large gains in performance will come from training compute alone. As we will see in the next section, the relationship between compute and performance is far from straightforward. Compute is changing rapidly, as fast as the technology it serves.

Number of notable machine learning models by geographic area, 2003–23 (sum)
Source: Epoch, 2023 | Chart: 2024 AI Index report

Figure 2: Number of notable machine learning models by geography (Maslej et al., 2024). The explosion in both necessary compute and associated cost has compounded concentration of breakthroughs in a few regions of the world.

Why does answering this question matter? The pervasive belief that compute drives progress has fundamentally reshaped the culture of conducting science in our field. Academia has been left unable to participate in breakthroughs because of a lack of access to compute (Maslej et al., 2024). Compute access disparities persist by region, concentrating participation in the West and China (Longpre et al., 2023; Maslej et al., 2024; Singh et al., 2024a). The large capital investment required for compute hungry workloads has also led to a changing publication culture. Our historically very open field is increasingly closed. The pervasive view in industry labs is to limit publishing to preserve important commercial advantages (Morris & Heikkilä, 2025).

The implication that scale is the key lever for progress also pervades responsible scaling policies released by key industry players like Anthropic (Anthropic, 2023) and Open AI (OpenAI, 2023). These frameworks implicitly assume scaling is inevitable – with the only open question being how to do it responsibly. The assumption that scaling is the only reliable marker of progress extends to government interventions in policing AI. The introduction of compute thresholds as part of the EU AI act and other legislation rests on the assumption models will always trend bigger (Hooker, 2024; The White House, 2023; European Union, 2024; Linghan et al., 2024; Senate, 2024; Linghan et al., 2024) and access to compute or hardware (on Foreign Affairs, 2024; Reuters, 2024; Peppin et al., 2025) is the best indicator of increased capabilities and risk. This all makes probing the assumption that scaling is inevitable even more critical. We have re-orientated our entire field and culture of discovery around bigger is better. Is it always?

2 A shift in the relationship between compute and performance.

(a) Open Leaderboard Scores For Small Models (<13B) Over Time

(b) Large models (>13B) that perform worse than Small Models (<13B)

Figure 3: Left: Plot of the best daily 13B or smaller model submitted to the Open LLM leaderboard over time. Even amongst comparable small sized models, performance has been growing rapidly. Right: The best small models (under 13B) submitted to the Open LLM leaderboard easily outperform far larger models. Over time there, larger models have out-performed small <13B models.

It is controversial in many circles to state that scaling is dying. This is largely because all the evidence from the last decade suggests it is sensible to keep scaling. Scaling compute unlocks larger model sizes or datasets. It is a widely favored formula because it has provided persuasive gains in overall performance. As the computer scientist Michael Jordan quipped “Today we can’t think without holding a piece of metal.” Increasing compute also conveniently fits into the cadence of quarterly industry planning, it is less risky to propose training a larger model than it is to propose an alternative optimization technique.

Relying on compute alone misses a critical shift that is underway in the relationship between scaling and performance. It is not always the case that bigger models result in better performance. The bitter lesson doesn’t explain why Falcon 180B (Almazrouei et al., 2023) is easily outperformed by far smaller open weights models such as Llama-3 8B (AI@Meta, 2024), Command R 35B (Cohere & Team, 2024), Gemma 3 27B (Team, 2024). It also doesn’t explain why Aya 23 8B (Aryabumi et al., 2024) and Aya Expanse 8B (Dang et al., 2024b) both easily outperform BLOOM 176B (Workshop et al., 2023) despite each having only 4.5% of the parameters. These are not isolated examples, but part of a systematic trend where there is no guaranty larger models consistently outperform smaller models. In Figure 3b, we plot the scores of models submitted to the Open LLM Leaderboard (Beeching et al., 2023) over the last two years. The trend is striking: over time there has been a surge in the number of small compact models that outperform far larger ones.

To understand why this is the case, we must understand what key variables have been driving gains in performance over the last decade. In an era where there are diminishing returns for the amount of compute available (Lohn & Jackson, 2022; Thompson et al., 2020), optimization and architecture breakthroughs define the rate of return for a given unit of compute. It is this rate of return which is most critical to the pace of progress and to the level of risk incurred by additional compute.

3 What influences the rate of return for compute?

In complex systems, it is challenging to manipulate one variable in isolation and foresee all implications. Throughout the 20th century doctors recommended removing tonsils in response to swelling or infection, but research has recently shown the removal may lead to higher incidence of throat cancer (Liang et al., 2023). Early televised drug prevention advertisements in the 2000s led to increased drug use rather than curbing abuse of drugs as intended (Terry-McElrath et al., 2011). In a similar vein, the belief that more compute equates with predictable gains in capabilities belies a far more complex picture. Below we explore some of the core contradictions.

3.1 Diminishing returns of increasing model size

Why do we even need extra weights in the first place? Model size is often quantified by the number of trainable weights or parameters. This metric has exploded over the last decade. Some of the first widely adopted deep neural networks like Inception (Szegedy et al., 2016) had 23 million weights. In contrast, recent releases like Qwen3-235B-A22B (Team, 2025) have 235 billion parameters. While this startling growth in model size has been driven by empirical gains from larger models, a key limitation of simply throwing more weights at a task is that the relationship between additional trainable weights and generalization remains poorly understood. A deep neural network learns and adjusts model weights during training to improve performance. When we scale the size of models, typically we are adding to the number of total weights that are learned over training. However, it is unclear why we need so many additional weights. What is particularly puzzling is that we also observe that we can get rid of most of these weights after we reach the end of training with minimal loss to overall performance. For example, it is well accepted you can completely remove the majority of trained weights (Gale et al., 2019; Li et al., 2020; Hou et al., 2020; Chen et al., 2021; Bai et al., 2020; Han et al., 2015; Evci et al., 2019; Denil et al., 2013; Ahmadian et al., 2023) in a network after training while not incurring sizable performance degradation. However, if you start training without these weights active it is impossible to reach the same end performance. If we can get rid of them afterwards, why do we need them in the first place?

Denil et al. (2014) find that a small set of weights can be used to predict 95% of weights in the network. This suggests many weights are highly correlated and there is a high degree of redundancy in the learned feature space. All of this suggests there is considerable redundancy in the size of the network. This may have more to do with the inefficiency of our learning techniques for deep neural networks, and how unstable optimization is if we start with a smaller network. If we had better learning techniques, we would probably need far smaller networks.

Increasing model size is a very costly way to learn the long tail. Deep neural networks are incredibly inefficient learners. Although deep neural networks learn common and frequent features efficiently and early in training (Agarwal & Hooker, 2020; Paul et al., 2021; Mangalam & Prabhu, 2019; Siddiqui et al., 2022; Abbe et al., 2021), these architectures require an incredible amount of compute and training time to learn infrequent features. This is because all modern networks are trained based upon minimization of average error (Goodfellow et al., 2016). Our typical training regime requires that all examples are shown the same number of times during the training (Xue et al., 2023), hence the signal of infrequent attributes is diluted in batch updates (Achille et al., 2017; Jiang et al., 2020; Mangalam & Prabhu, 2019; Faghri et al., 2020; Frankle et al., 2020; Arpit et al., 2017; Hooker et al., 2020; Hooker, 2021a). Most attributes in the real world are infrequent, part of what makes human intelligence unique is our ability to pattern match and process long tail and previously unseen instances efficiently. This is exactly where deep neural networks struggle the most. The bulk of compute during training is spent memorizing the long tail in a prohibitively costly way. It is akin to building a ladder to the moon.

3.2 Data quality reduces reliance on compute.

Models trained on better data do not require as much compute. A large body of work has emerged which shows that efforts to better curate training corpus, including de-duping (Taylor et al., 2022; Kocetkov et al., 2022), data pruning (Marion et al., 2023; Singh et al., 2024b; Sorscher et al., 2023; Albalak et al., 2024; Tirumala et al., 2023; Chimoto et al., 2024) or data prioritization (Boubdir et al., 2023; Thakkar et al., 2023) can compensate for larger models. This suggests that the number of learnable parameters is not definitively the constraint on improving performance; investments in better data quality mitigate the need for more weights (Singh et al., 2024b; Penedo et al., 2023; Raffel et al., 2020; Lee et al., 2022; D’souza et al., 2025). If the size of a training dataset can be reduced without impacting performance (Marion et al., 2023), training time is reduced. This directly impacts the amount of training time and means less compute is needed.

3.3 New algorithmic techniques compensate for compute.

Progress over the last few years has been as much due to algorithmic improvements as it has been due to compute. This includes extending pre-training with instruction finetuning to teach models instruction following (Singh et al., 2024a), model distillation using synthetic data from larger more performant "teachers" to train highly capable, smaller "students" (Team et al., 2024b; Aryabumi et al., 2024), chain-of-thought reasoning (Wei et al., 2023; Hsieh et al., 2023), increased context-length (Xiong et al., 2023), retrieval augmented generation (Pozzobon et al., 2023; Lewis et al., 2020), and preference training to align models with human feedback (Dang et al., 2024a; Ahmadian et al., 2024; Ouyang et al., 2022; Bai et al., 2022; Lee et al., 2023; Tunstall et al., 2023; Khalifa et al., 2021; Rafailov et al., 2023; Azar et al., 2023). All of these techniques compensate for the need for heavy weights or expensive prolonged training (Ho et al., 2024b). All things equal, these have been shown to dramatically improve model performance relative to a model trained without these optimization tricks given the same level of compute (Davidson et al., 2023; Hernandez & Brown, 2020; Erdil & Besiroglu, 2023; METR Team, 2023; Liu et al., 2024). We are doing significantly more with the same amount of resources.

3.4 Architecture plays a significant role in determining scalability

Architecture plays an enormous role at determining the overall rate of return in performance given a unit of compute. It also plays a crucial role in determining the ceiling of progress. The introduction of a new architecture design can fundamentally change the relationship between compute and performance (Tay et al., 2022; Sevilla et al., 2022; Ho et al., 2024a) and render any existing scaling law irrelevant. For example, the key breakthroughs in AI adoption around the world were the introduction of architectures like convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for vision (Ciresan et al., 2011; Krizhevsky et al., 2012; Szegedy et al., 2014) and Transformers for language modeling (Vaswani et al., 2023).

4 The limits of scaling laws.

Warren Buffett once said, 

Don’t ask the barber if you need a haircut.

In the same vein, don’t ask a computer scientist or economist whether they can predict the future. The temptation to say yes often overrides a necessary humility about what can and cannot be predicted accurately. One such area where hubris has overridden common sense is attempts to predict the relationship between scale and performance in the form of scaling laws (Kaplan et al., 2020; Hernandez et al., 2021; Dhariwal et al., 2021) which either try and predict how a model’s pre-training loss scales (Bowman, 2023) or how downstream properties emerge with scale.

Figure 4: Bytes Magazine Cover, Volume 5, 1980. Compute is rarely the only determinant of progress. Data quality, instructionfinetuning, preference training, retrieval augmented networks, enabled tool use, chain-of-thought reasoning, increased context-length are all algorithmic techniques which add little or no training compute but result in significant gains in performance.

Scaling laws emerged as a symptom of our extreme trust in compute being one of the primary catalysts of progress. It has entered the mainstream discussion as a catchall phrase to justify everything from massive capital investments in AI startups to policy decisions about compute thresholds. It is easy to understand why scaling laws are enticing, if you can predict how capabilities change with the amount of compute you can justify capital expenditures on compute. However, while performance typically increases with scaling, our track record of predicting exactly how much it does is surprisingly lacking. This means that it is difficult to scientifically determine a rate of return for a given level of compute.

One of the biggest limitations of scaling laws is that they have only been shown to hold when predicting a model’s pretraining test loss (Bowman, 2023), which measures the model’s ability to correctly predict how an incomplete piece of text will be continued. Indeed, when actual performance on downstream tasks is used, the results are often murky or inconsistent (Ganguli et al., 2022; Schaeffer et al., 2023; Anwar et al., 2024a; Ganguli et al., 2022; Schaeffer et al., 2024; Hu et al., 2024). Ironically, the term emerging properties is often used to describe this discrepancy (Wei et al., 2022; Srivastava et al., 2023): a property that appears “suddenly” as the complexity of the system increases and cannot be predicted. Somewhat humorously, the acceptance that there are emergent properties which appear out of nowhere is another way of saying our scaling laws don’t actually equip us to know what is coming.

Even when limited to predicting test loss, there have been issues with replicability of scaling results under slightly different assumptions about the distribution (Besiroglu et al., 2024; Anwar et al., 2024b). Research has also increasingly found that many downstream capabilities display irregular scaling curves (Srivastava et al., 2023) or non power-law scaling (Caballero et al., 2023). For complex systems that require projecting into the future, small errors end up accumulating due to time step dependencies being modeled. This makes accurate predictions of when risks will emerge inherently difficult, which is compounded by the small sample sizes that are often available for analysis. Each data point is a model, and computation cost means scaling “laws” are frequently based upon analysis of less than 100 data points (Ruan et al., 2024)). This means that many reported power law relationships can lack statistical support and power (Stumpf & Porter, 2012). The reliability of the scaling laws varies considerably by domain. For example, code-generation has shown fairly predictable power law scaling across 10 orders of magnitude of compute (Hu et al., 2024; Anwar et al., 2024a). However, other capabilities have been shown to scale far more erratically (Srivastava et al., 2023; Caballero et al., 2023).

Scaling laws may be useful for planning training runs because they hold well when architecture, optimization and data quality stay the same. These tend to be short term changes in a controlled regime. However, scaling laws have not stood up to rigor when extrapolated over even medium time horizons (Stumpf & Porter, 2012). The failure of scaling laws supports the takeaway that scaling compute is far from a straightforward axis of progress. Indeed, frontier AI companies which place disproportionate emphasis on scaling laws are likely under-investing in other directions of innovation which will unlock future gains.

5 The way forward.

In folklore, the silver bullet was one of the few techniques that was an effective defense not only against werewolves, but also a protection against vampires and witches. This led to the term silver bullet to describe an intervention that solves many things at once. In computer science, we have treated compute as our silver bullet.

We are observing a bifurcation in compute trends. On the one hand, at least in the short term, models are likely to continue to get bigger as we attempt to squeeze more out of our dying architecture. On the other hand, the relationship between compute and performance is increasingly strained and hard to predict (Niu et al., 2024).

Figure 5: It is a fun time to be a computer scientist as our levers for teaching models how to think are changing rapidly. These new techniques are often far more efficient and many don’t even require gradient updates. Many of these spaces are also under-explored and will evolve rapidly over the next few years.

So where should we go next? The frontier labs which will lead in innovation will not bet on compute alone. Indeed, the most interesting axes of progress are due to fundamental paradigm shifts in the optimization spaces available to computer scientists. One key aspect that makes this era different is the expanded set of tools computer scientists must optimize. This will change a great deal about where computer scientists spend time and the nature of discovery itself. I will include some thoughts below on the most exciting to explore.

5.1 New Optimization spaces

Gradient free exploration Increasingly, a lot of computation is spent outside of training to improve performance of a model. Traditionally, if you wanted higher performance from a machine learning model, you paid for it with more training or data or parameters. A key departure from this is the recent emphasis on scaling up compute at inference time rather than at training time (Khairi et al., 2025; Hooker, 2024; Wei et al., 2023; Hsieh et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023; Mora et al., 2025). These strategies which include search, tool use, agentic swarms and adaptive compute allow for improvements in performance by spending more compute without any alterations to the model itself. In a radical departure from the last 30 years of AI progress, many of these techniques are gradient free involving no updates to the parameters in order to induce changes in performance. The limited work to-date which has evaluated a subset of ‘inference-time compute” improvements estimates these can impart gains between 5x and 20x of base level posttraining performance (Davidson et al., 2023). Relative to the large volumes of compute needed for pre-training these techniques have minimal footprint (Villalobos & Atkinson, 2023; Huang et al., 2022; D’souza et al., 2025).

A malleable data space Historically, high-quality labeled data has been costly to curate due to, amongst other factors, scarcity of available data (Singh et al., 2024a; 2025) and financial cost (Gilardi et al., 2023; Boubdir et al., 2023). This high cost has precluded adapting training sets “on-the-fly” to increase coverage or task diversity. As a result, researchers have often treated datasets as static representations of the world, far from the rich, ever-evolving environment we navigate as humans. These frozen snapshots in time like MNIST (Deng, 2012), ImageNet (Deng et al., 2009), SQuAD (Rajpurkar et al., 2016) were the foundation upon which progress in AI has been built.

The cost of having historically static and rigid training datasets is extremely high. Models perform better on the distribution they are trained to mimic (Schwartz et al., 2022; Vashishtha et al., 2023; Khondaker et al., 2023). At inference time, data points are not equally relevant, but it is often prohibitively expensive to go back and change the training distribution for each individual inference request. Hence, there is a mismatch in the distribution at training and inference time: training time distribution is often determined by ease of access to prior data collections and data augmentation efforts, while at inference time, new use cases might be underrepresented in the data but highly relevant to the user.

A fundamental revolution is underway where the cost of generating synthetic data is now low enough that we can treat the data space as malleable and something which can be optimized. We can steer synthetic data towards desirable properties (Shimabucoro et al., 2024; Dash et al., 2025), and make previously invisible worlds with limited data coverage more visible (Aryabumi et al., 2024; Üstün et al., 2024; Team et al., 2024a; Mora et al., 2025). The importance of this is hard to overstate, with a malleable data space it is possible to target parts of the distribution that are less frequent. It is also a radical departure from assumptions that have guided machine learning fundamentals such as assuming IID (independent and identically distributed) samples. We are now able to intentionally skew the distribution towards what we hope to represent, rather than accepting a random sample of the world as it is.

The role of design and interface The most intelligent system will increasingly be defined by building an algorithm that can interact with the world. This means for the first time researchers who care about intelligence need also be obsessed with how a model interacts. What was previously the narrow purview of UX designers, artists and human computer interaction specialists, should now be of great interest to all computer scientists. Increasingly, progress at the frontier will require building a system involving multiple components rather than a single algorithm to rule them all.

5.2 Future odds of a return to scaling

Does this mean we will never return to scaling? As long as we are stuck with transformers as an architecture it doesn’t make sense to keep scaling compute. Our current architecture shows all the signs of plateauing in returns from additional compute. While progress has revolved around deep neural networks for the last decade, there is much to suggest that the next significant step forward will require an entirely different architecture. As our models interact with the world, we need new ways to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, where performance deteriorates on the original task because new information interferes with previously learned behavior (Mcclelland et al., 1995; Pozzobon et al., 2023). Deep neural networks are particularly poor at continual learning because of our reliance on global updates, which leads to more stable training but doesn’t allow for specialization of knowledge in similar ways to what we have with regions of the brain.

What does the slow death of scaling training compute mean for the environmental impact of AI? It is important to make a distinction between the shifting trends between compute and performance, and overall computational overhead of AI as a whole. While we will see ever smaller, more performant models – AI workloads will also be deployed in many more settings. This means that this essay should not be taken as a position that the overall environmental impact and energy cost of AI is not a formidable problem. This caveat is important to make, because the majority of energy requirements of AI workloads is not in training, but instead the cost to productionize an ML workload and serve it to billions of users. Even if model size is trending smaller, the widespread adoption of AI means overall energy requirements will likely continue to rise and is far from negligible (Strubell et al., 2019a; Schwartz et al., 2020; Derczynski, 2020; Patterson et al., 2021; Luccioni et al., 2025; Wu et al., 2022; Treviso et al., 2023).

5.3 Parting thoughts

It is meaningful that the statement that we can’t rely solely on compute is gaining recognition in the mainstream conversation. This essay brings together previous writing on several topics that are timely: the changing relationship we have with compute, our expanded optimization spaces and how scaling has irrevocably changed out research culture. One thing is certain, is the less reliable gains from compute makes our purview as computer scientists interesting again. We can now stray from the beaten path of boring, predictable gains from throwing compute at the problem. It is fitting to conclude with a quote from Alan Turing

“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.”

5.4 Acknowledgments

This work draws upon reflections I have shared in talks over the last few years with some of my existing writing on the topic (Hooker, 2020; 2024). Decreasing returns to scaling has started to gain prominence in the wider conversation, which has resulted in renewed interest in these works. A warm thank you to Sudip Roy, Hugo Larochelle and John Dang who read and provided feedback on a version of this draft. Thanks to Thomas Euyang who helped with an earlier version of the design for Figure 5.

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Modeling Semantics: How Data Models and Ontologies Connect to Build Your Semantic Foundations

Mike's Notes

I discovered this reference in the Data Engineering Weekly from Ananth Packkildurai to this great article by Juha Korpela.

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Modeling Semantics: How Data Models and Ontologies Connect to Build Your Semantic Foundations

By: Juha Korpela
Modern Data 101 (Medium): 22/01/2026

Independent Consultant | Data Modelling Enthusiast | Founder @ Helsinki Data Week.

This piece is a community contribution from Juha Korpela, Independent Consultant and Founder of Helsinki Data Week, a community-first data conference. With deep expertise in information architecture, data products, and modern operating models, Juha has spent his career helping organisations truly understand what their data means and how to use that semantic clarity to build better systems.

Formerly Chief Product Officer at Ellie Technologies and now the voice behind the “Common Sense Data” Substack, Juha is also a speaker, trainer, and advisor shaping the resurgence of conceptual modeling in the industry. We’re thrilled to feature his unique insights on Modern Data 101!

We actively collaborate with data experts to bring the best resources to a 15,000+ strong community of data leaders and practitioners. If you have something to share, reach out!

Share your ideas and work: community@moderndata101.com

  • Note: Opinions expressed in contributions are not our own and are only curated by us for broader access and discussion. All submissions are vetted for quality & relevance. We keep it information-first and do not support any promotions, paid or otherwise!

Let’s Dive In!

Knowledge Management Provides Context for AI

Knowledge Management and Information Architecture have had a rocket ride to the top of the data world’s consciousness due to Generative AI. The ability to organize, store, and serve structured semantics as context to various agents and chatbots is widely recognized as a winning ingredient in the GenAI race, reducing hallucinations and improving accuracy.

Terms like taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs are being thrown around as if just been invented, but veterans of the trade know better: there’s nothing new under the sun.

Knowledge Management and the Library Sciences, from which these subjects were born, are well-known disciplines, and the theory behind concepts like the Semantic Web is solid. It’s merely the utilization of these that has now changed with GenAI.

Data Modeling Foundations Return

But when it comes to organizing, storing, and serving semantics, there have always been two schools of thought, usually with very little cross-pollination between them. The other viewpoints outside ontologies and knowledge graphs have been coming from the data modeling world.

Traditionally, data modeling has had different levels of abstraction to cover different needs at different levels of detail. Conceptual, Logical, and Physical modeling has been a well-recognized three-level layout for data modeling activities (you can check my views on these three levels on my Substack).

But sadly, at some point in the Big Data craze of yesteryear, many data experts reduced data modeling to the Physical level only, focusing almost exclusively on the technical structures of data storage.

Where Semantics Was Compromised

By forgoing Conceptual modelling to a large extent, data experts had let go of a very practical method for doing exactly the same thing that is now required from taxonomies, ontologies, and knowledge graphs: describing structured semantics.

At the core of both ontologies and conceptual data models are things: real-life entities that exist in the real business, irrespective of the systems we have built. You might call these things “entities” or “objects” or “nodes” or whatever you like,

…but they are what you need to understand in order to describe

(to a human or an agent) what goes on in your business.

Think of “Customer”, “Order”, “Product”, “Delivery”, and so on. These are what you have data about, no matter how the data is technically stored in database tables or files.

In addition to the list of things, to fully understand the business context, we need relationships between the things. How do the things in our business interact with each other? Think “Customer makes an Order”, “Product is added to Delivery”, and so on.

Ontology vs. Conceptual Model

An ontology is, in simple terms, a list of things (and their definitions) with a list of the relationships between them. In the Knowledge Management world, this would be formalized according to, say, RDF standards.

A conceptual model is, in simple terms, also a list of things and their relationships. Data modelers traditionally produce an Entity-Relationship Diagram out of it, with a list of entity definitions (a Glossary) attached.

Now here’s the important thing to understand, regardless of which world you are coming from:

the semantical content you capture with both approaches is exactly the same!

Merely the method of capturing, organizing, and storing that information is different.

For me personally, the method of conceptual modeling feels natural, as I’ve done data modeling for around 15 years now. I know what questions I need to ask people (or what documents to read) to capture information about the entities and their relationships, I know how to draw the diagram, I know how to create the glossary, and I know what tools I can use to help.

For someone coming from a semantic web background, building formalized ontologies according to the RDF standard feels natural, with all the methods and tools that come with it.

We’re both still working on semantics: in effect, we’re capturing the exact same ontology, thus storing information about business context to be used later.

Technical Implementation of Semantics

For us data modelers, the utilization of these models has traditionally focused on the technical implementation of data solutions, and we’ve thus followed a path from Conceptual to Logical to Physical. That is, if we have done conceptual modeling at all!

But especially now, in the age of context-hungry AI, we have to realize we’ve been sitting on a semantics gold mine: conceptual data modeling is an excellent method for figuring out what the entities and relationships should be.

The diagram titled “How Data Models & Ontologies Connect to Build Semantic Foundations” shows “Understanding the business” leading into “Conceptual Modeling,” which branches into two paths: “Solution Design” and “Semantic Discovery”. The ontology also integrates inputs from Standard Ontologies and AI Agents.

How Data Models and Ontologies Connect to Build Semantic Foundations | Source: Author

Why is this important? Because the most valuable semantical information is that which is unique to the organization, and those semantics are the hardest to capture.

While AI tools can be used to find semantical concepts from unstructured data and various knowledge bases, a lot of this information is tacit knowledge in the business experts’ heads. Conceptual modeling is a known-good method for getting that tacit knowledge out.

Data Modeling as Semantic Discovery

I envision a world where we build the semantic foundation of an organization with a set of tools at our disposal:

A pyramid diagram titled “Building Organisational Semantics” illustrating the layers of a Semantic Foundation. The foundation acts as a context provider for both agents and humans. It features three tiers: Industry Standards at the base for common structures, Conceptual Modeling in the center to unearth unique organisational knowledge, and AI Agents at the apex to find details that enhance core semantics.

Technical Implementation of the semantic Foundation with Industry Standards, Conceptual Modeling, and AI Agents | Insights from the Author

  • We use industry standards and existing knowledge bases to cover the basic structures that are common to most organizations within an industry
  • We use conceptual modeling methods as a surgical knife to cut through tacit knowledge and unearth & document the valuable, unique semantics of the organization
  • We use AI agents as “semantic helpers” to trawl through tons of documentation and find details to add around the strong core that has been formed

This semantic foundation will then act as the context provider for all your agents and chatbots, but also for humans! Context is king in today’s world. By looking at data modeling as not only a technical design method, but as a semantic discovery method, we enable a powerful tool for building this context.

The Andon Cord

Mike's Notes

A fascinating history that begins with Toyota.

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The Andon Cord

By: John Willis
IT Revolution: 15/10/2023

John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years and is a prolific author, including "Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" and "The DevOps Handbook." He is researching DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance. Previously he was an Evangelist at Docker Inc., VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell), and VP of Training & Services at Opscode where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks for IBM on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.

The origin of the word “Andon” in Japanese comes from the use of traditional lighting equipment using a fire burning lamp made out of paper and bamboo. This “Andon” idea was later translated for use in manufacturing in Japan. The “Andon” became used as a signal to highlight an anomaly (i.e., a flashing light). This signal would be used to amplify potential defects in quality. When a defect was suspected, a sign board would light up signaling the specific workstation having a problem. The signal event would also indicate that the system was stopped due to the defect and was waiting for the problem to be resolved.

The process of stopping a system when a defect was suspected originates back to the original Toyota System Corporation to something called Jidoka. The idea behind Jidoka is that by stopping the system you get an immediate opportunity for improvement, or find a root cause, as opposed to letting the defect move further down the line and be unresolved.

The Jidoka concept was pioneered by the original Toyota founder, Sakichi Toyoda. Sakichi Toyoda is known as the father of the Japanese industrial revolution and also the founder of the original Toyota Systems Corporation (before they manufactured automobiles).

Sakichi Toyoda invented the automatic power loom in 1924 where the loom would automatically stop if a sewing needle broke. Before his invention, the loom would continue even when the needle was broken.  When this occurred, the downstream process would produce runs in the fabric stitches of the final product. 

Toyota Production Systems

Approximately 25 years later, a gentleman named Taiichi Ohno, who is considered the father of “Toyota Production Systems (TPS)”, architected a leadership and technology model incorporating some of the original Jidoka ideas along with a lot of other interesting innovations. His ideas produced an unprecedented run of quality and manufacturing success for over 40 years.

To this day, what was done at TPS from around 1950 to 1990 still can’t be repeated in automobile manufacturing, and many have tried. An abundance of material has been written about TPS, also coined as Lean over the years, and many have tried to copy TPS from that body of knowledge.

Toyota Kata

Mike Rother in his Toyota Kata book points out that of the many who try to emulate Toyota, most miss the invisible side of what they were doing.

The key, as Rother suggests, is that it wasn’t the tools that made Toyota great, it was the culture and specific behavior associated behind those tools. One of the best examples of this was the use of the Andon Cord at Toyota.

The Andon Cord was a manifestation of the original Jidoka principle. Toyota implemented the Andon Cord as a physical rope that followed the assembly line and could be pulled to stop the manufacturing line at any time. Most western culture analysis of this type of Cord might assume this was implemented as a safety cut off switch. At Toyota, it was a tool to instill autonomic behavior patterns. This is what Rother calls Kata.

Furthermore, this wasn’t an ask permission to stop the line, the pull actually stopped the line. As the story goes, anyone could pull the Andon Cord anytime.

Sounds mad doesn’t it? Salvador Dali eloquently says “The only difference between a madman and me is that I’m not mad.” 

At TPS, the Cord was pulled often. The mechanics of the Andon Cord were if the Cord was pulled, not only did the line stop, but an “andon” would light up on a signal board to indicate the workstation that was having the issue.

Beyond the mechanics, the culture behind the Andon Cord was a lot more interesting. The first thing that would happen when the Andon Cord was pulled is that a team leader would immediately “go-see” the issue by visiting the workstation. This was unconditional.

Toyota lived by this “Show Me” culture where in a western culture organization a team lead might put down the coffee on his or her desk and call the workstation to find out what was happening. This is a key point here. The “go-see” removes any preconceived notions or potential bias related to the problem. The “go-see” process is fact based.

High Velocity Edge

In Dr. Steven Spear’s The High Velocity Edge, he describes a horrifying story of missed opportunities leading up to the 2003 NASA Columbia space shuttle disaster.

The short version of the story is that the thermal protection system on the left wing was damaged just after launch but didn’t become an issue until reentry 19 days later. After the disaster, an investigation board charged with reviewing the accident found there were at least eight attempted signaling events to notify the crew requesting that they “go-see” the damage. The first request happened as early as the fourth day of the mission. These ‘signals’ were not addressed because there was a cognitive bias at NASA regarding this particular issue. This kind of damage had happened on previous missions and they had always been successful. Diane Vaughan, a Columbia University sociologist, coined this as “normalization of deviance”. This is where an organization tends to accept risky anomalies as normal through repeated success.

This form of a blind spot is also referred to as outcome bias. Outcome bias is where people observe successful outcomes as results as opposed to addressing individual problems at face value. Sidney Dekker in The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error states this kind of the anti Murphy’s Law in that, what can go wrong usually goes right.  Organizations get desensitized due to more positive outcomes than exposed failures. 

Dr. Spear suggests some counterfactuals that are intellectually interesting, or at least proposes learning opportunities for the reader. He suggests the Columbia crew could have been notified and possibly done an extravehicular activity (EVA) inspection to look at the damage.

Instead, NASA ignored repeated attempts, andon pulls if you will, to “go-see” the factual conditions. NASA unfortunately was mired in culture bias’ and preconceived notions of what constituted a real (“go-see”) opportunity. Maybe if the crew had been notified of just one of the eight known signals, they might have been able to access the damage, and possibly NASA could have done a recovery mission.

The meta-point here is that, ironically, NASA didn’t operate like scientists, unlike Toyota’s relentless “go-see” Kata.

Safety Culture

A second important cultural aspect of the “Andon Cord” process at Toyota was that when the team leader arrived at the workstation, he or she thanked the team member who pulled the Cord. This was another unconditional behavior reinforcement. The repetition of this simple gesture formed a learning pattern of what we call today “Safety Culture”. The team member did not, or would never be, in a position of feeling fear or retribution for stopping the line.

Quite the contrary, the team member was always rewarded verbally. What Toyota was saying to the team member was “We thank you and your CEO thanks you.  You have saved a customer from receiving a defect.” Moreover, they were saying, “You have given us (Toyota) an opportunity to learn and for that we really thank you.”

No defect was too small or even if the Cord was mistakenly pulled, the response would never be negative.

In Toyota Kata, Rother says that if you look up the word “failure” in the dictionary, it never implies that “failure” is a bad word.  In a classic tayloristic western culture, we tend to shy way from failure at all cost.  We penalize failure and we typically never embrace it. At TPS, failure was embraced and rewarded. As Rother also discusses in his book, that at Toyota, at their core, believed failure created learning opportunities.

Improvement Kata

The third important behavior reinforcement of the “Andon Cord” process was that the issue was a priority. In fact, the second thing that would happen when the team leader would arrive at the workstation after the thank you, is that he or she would ask “How can I help you?”. An important aspect of this is the “you”.

The incident was not going to be some paper report or bureaucratic long tail process. The problem was going to be immediately addressed and in fact, the team member who pulled the Cord was the one who was going to fix it.

Another overarching aspect to the culture at Toyota was that everyone had a mentor. The mentor/mentee relationship was one where it was very important that the mentee understand the problem. Again in western culture organizations, even if a worker felt empowered to stop the line, they might not be inclined to do so if they thought the problem would not get fixed. Even worse, have the issue get bogged down in useless paperwork and never ending meetings. The team leader at Toyota would then proceed to ask a series of questions trying to drill down to a point where the team member would understand the issue.

Another key point in this process was that even if the team leader knew a better answer, Toyota principally felt that a solution from the team member was a better outcome. In other words, if the problem is not understood at the line level, that is the team member/mentee, then the problem was not solved.

This is what I would call learning at scale.

Plan Do Change Act (PDCA)

Furthermore, the process of solving the issues was controlled by a practice described by Dr. Edwards Deming called Plan Do Change Act (PDCA). At its core, PDCA is basic scientific method.

Rother refers to this set of tools as Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata.

The Improvement Kata was an iterative mentor/mentee PDCA loop whereas the Coaching Kata was a sort of Socratic dialog between the mentor and mentee. Again, an important point here is the team member (mentee) would always solve the problem. It was of high importance that the team member always solve the problem. Most importantly, it was critical for the team member to understand how the problem was solved. Otherwise, there would not be in inherent learning and therefore, no real improvement.

Solving problems at Toyota was not the goal, understanding how to solve the problem was. Solving problems in an Improvement Kata mode also creates a second order effect.  By solving one problem, sometimes other second order problems are exposed. 

Alcoa, the aluminum company, set out to have a zero on the job injury policy in 1987. Paul O’Neal, the new CEO at the time, created a policy that if anyone at Alcoa was hurt on the job, he needed to be notified within 24 hours. This was not slogan based safety. This was an organizational behavior modification to create a line of sight understanding of why injuries occur at Alcoa.

The results were unprecedented. However, the interesting side effect of this was that through this rigorous process of forced understanding, they exposed what they called other “pockets of ignorance”.  Their attention to detail for solving their first order problem, safety, surfaced other second order process improvements not necessarily related to safety.

At Toyota, it was important to instill an Improvement Kata based on a PDCA loop. Plan (P) a countermeasure, implement the countermeasure (D), check or study the results (C), and act on the results either it’s fixed or start the next countermeasure (A). Imagine all those masked problems that that never get noticed in large complex IT infrastructures due to a possible irregularity of the first order issues and non “go-see” approaches. 

There is a great story in the Toyota Kata book where at one point a particular Toyota plant notices that the average Andon Cord pulls in a shift goes down from 1000 to 700.  As Rother describes most western culture organizations would break out the champagne for such an occasion, not Toyota.  The CEO called an all-hands meeting to address the “problem”.

Notice I said problem.

The CEO then goes on to describe that “we” must have one of two problems here.  One, we are getting lazy and letting more defects get through the system or two, if that is not the case, then we are not operating at our full potential. He was telling everyone that if they were staffed to handle 1000 pulls per shift, then they should be pulling a 1000 Cords per shift.

The cornerstone behind this kind of thinking is that Toyota had a vision of having 1×1 flow. This is where there is no inventory build up and work flows freely at every point of the workflow. Even though 1×1 was sort of a “true north” at Toyota, the CEO was reminding all of them that their Kata should always be pointing towards that direction, what Rother calls the Vision.

In plain words, the CEO is saying more pulls equals more learning which means more improvement that gets us towards our vision. 1X1 was a means to an end to say “If we can produce cars faster, cheaper and with higher quality, we win.”

Amazon and the Customer Service Andon Cord

The Andon Cord has become a metaphor for some modern day Web Scale organizations as well.

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, described in a 2013 letter to the Amazon’s shareholders a practice he called the Customer Service Andon Cord. This was an established practice of metaphorically pulling an Andon Cord when they noticed a customer was overpaying or had overpaid for a service.

Amazon would heuristically scan their systems looking for these kinds of potential customer service mismatches. These were considered defects at Amazon because they had a vision of being an organization that was always customer centric. They would automatically refund a customer, without the customer even asking, if the service delivery was suboptimal.

I have had this happen to me on a few occasions watching a movie on Amazon Prime, where the next day I received an email telling me they refunded my movie rental cost due to poor quality. They would also pull the Andon Cord where they found areas where a customer could be saving money. We see this all the time where Amazon reduces their Cloud Services price even though their service is considered far superior to their closest competitor.

This is a form of Kata in practice that drives Amazon towards their stated vision.

In that same shareholders letter, Bezos starts off with a line as follows: “Our energy at Amazon comes from the desire to impress customers rather than the zeal to best competitors”. It’s no mistake that two of the top 12 books on Jeff Bezos’s recommended reading list are The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt and Lean Thinking by James Womack. In fact, The Goal is one of the three books he has all of his top executives read.

The Chaos Cord

Another example of an Andon Cord metaphor used in Web Scale businesses is at Netflix.

Netflix has an interesting way of exercising their Andon Cord, although they don’t actually call it an Andon Cord. Along the same line as Toyota, at Netflix failures are good things. Netflix has built in their own automated form of Jidoka.

As described earlier, Jidoka is a practice of stopping a process if it breaks. In the earlier example, the process we described was done via the physical Andon Cord and was a manual process. At Toyota, there were also automated forms of Jidoka practiced. Another famous engineer named Shigeo Shingo, who worked with Taiichi Ohno, is credited with the idea of pre-automation. This is a form of Jidoka that is automatic.

At Netflix, they actually inject this kind of Jidoko into their systems on purpose by intentionally trying to break systems in production. They have developed what is now famously called Chaos Monkey. Chaos Monkey is a process that randomly kills live running production servers. This behavior is known by everyone who works at Netflix. It’s part of their culture. There are no surprises about this practice.  Developers plan and Poka-Yoke their code and systems accordingly.

Poka-Yoke is another term that comes from Shigeo Shingo at TPS. Poka-Yoke means mistake-proofing. 

I was told by Adrian Cockcroft, one of the primary architects behind Netflix’s IT infrastructure, that not knowing about the Chaos Monkey mode coming into a job interview at Netflix was pretty much an immediate no-hire decision.

Imagine that Netflix’s Kata is so obsessed with failure they create their own failures on purpose. As you can imagine, Netflix is a learning organization and every one of these failures is treated as a science experiment.

They might not literally practice PDCA, but either one of two things happens when a server is killed by their Chaos monkey.  One, they learn that there were dormant defects in the process and fix them, or two, the injected failure was corrected automatically. The best case was where the injected failure caused no customer disruption. Their Improvement Kata was always moving in that direction.

Like any good operating Kata based organization, Netflix has been practicing their Kata for quite a few years now. You don’t get to Chaos Monkey overnight. Much of their Kata has been based on continual learning improvements.

One interesting method or Poka-Yoke, if you will, is something they do called Circuit Breaker Pattern.  Circuit Breaker Pattern comes from a book called Release-It by Mike Nygard.

These are software delivery patterns where the software code is designed very much like a circuit breaker in your home. If one service dies it isolates or is bounded to only fail the things it controls and not create cascading service outages. Think about a fuse in your home. If you inadvertently load up to much power in one area of your house you only wind up losing power in an isolated section.

Netflix does a similar implementation for their software services. Their application design is such that one thing breaking should never create cascading failures (like a overloaded circuit/fuse combo in your house).

The main point here is that implementing an Andon Cord in an organization is not something you do overnight. It takes a continuous improvement roadmap to get there and must have behavior reinforcement built into the process. It takes a fierce commitment and practice of improvement (Improvement Kata) and an equally skilled leadership coaching approach (Coaching Kata).

If you want to investigate the concept of Kata more deeply, I highly recommend reading Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata.

Agent Card

Mike's Notes

Earlier this week, I attended the APAC Cloud Technical Series: On Board from Google. It was 10 hours over 2 days of talks and code workshops from Google staff, who were mainly based in Singapore.

It was excellent and worth the time. I signed up for more sessions planned later in the year. Google Weeklies is a regular in-depth talk available both live and as an archive. Excellent stuff.

I got an invite to join Google for Startups' Rising Founders program. I hope that this will lead to access to researchers at Google DeepMind. I have questions.

I initially registered to participate in the Gen AI Academy APAC Edition, which would have been fun, but then I discovered an age restriction. I'm too ancient. 😊

IaC

This will help me build Pipi Engines to build, deploy, and manage infrastructure-as-code (IaC) in the cloud.

A dedicated agent engine has been created for each cloud platform. They have yet to be differentiated.

  • Apple Engine (ale)
  • AWS Engine (aws)
  • AZURE Engine (azu)
  • Digital Ocean Engine (dgo)
  • Google Cloud Engine (ggc)
  • IBM Engine (ibm)
  • Meta Engine (met)
  • Oracle Engine (ora)
  • (More will be added later; all are welcome)

Agents

Pipi 9 is a type of world-model AI, not an LLM. Google is offering a platform for LLM-based generative AI agents. My thought is to connect Pipi 9 to these external agents via open protocols, leveraging the strengths of both.

  • MCP
    • PostgreSQL
    • TPU
    • etc
  • A2A
    • Agent Card
  • ADK

More Pipi engines

  • MCP Engine (mcp)

Agent card

Here are some initial notes about the Agent Card protocol, part of A2A. I will start building from there.

Pipi is an agent built from hundreds of other kinds of deeply nested agents, and is capable of learning, evolving and replicating. So does this mean that Pipi needs its own Agent Card? 😀

Resources

References

  • Reference

Repository

  • Home > Ajabbi Research > Library >
  • Home > Handbook > 

Last Updated

13/02/2026

Agent Card

By: Mike Peters
On a Sandy Beach: 1/02/2026

Mike is the inventor and architect of Pipi and the founder of Ajabbi.

From A2A Protocol Documentation

A2A revolves around several key concepts. For detailed explanations, please refer to the Key Concepts guide.

    • A2A Client: An application or agent that initiates requests to an A2A Server on behalf of a user or another system.
    • A2A Server (Remote Agent): An agent or agentic system that exposes an A2A-compliant endpoint, processing tasks and providing responses.
    • Agent Card: A JSON metadata document published by an A2A Server, describing its identity, capabilities, skills, service endpoint, and authentication requirements.
    • Message: A communication turn between a client and a remote agent, having a role ("user" or "agent") and containing one or more Parts.
    • Task: The fundamental unit of work managed by A2A, identified by a unique ID. Tasks are stateful and progress through a defined lifecycle.
    • Part: The smallest unit of content within a Message or Artifact. Parts can contain text, file references, or structured data.
    • Artifact: An output (e.g., a document, image, structured data) generated by the agent as a result of a task, composed of Parts.
    • Streaming: Real-time, incremental updates for tasks (status changes, artifact chunks) delivered via protocol-specific streaming mechanisms.
    • Push Notifications: Asynchronous task updates delivered via server-initiated HTTP POST requests to a client-provided webhook URL, for long-running or disconnected scenarios.
    • Context: An optional, server-generated identifier to logically group related tasks and messages.
    • Extension: A mechanism for agents to provide additional functionality or data beyond the core A2A specification.

- A2A Protocol Documentation

Agent Discovery in A2A

To collaborate using the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, AI agents need to first find each other and understand their capabilities. A2A standardizes agent self-descriptions through the Agent Card. However, discovery methods for these Agent Cards vary by environment and requirements. The Agent Card defines what an agent offers. Various strategies exist for a client agent to discover these cards. The choice of strategy depends on the deployment environment and security requirements.

The Role of the Agent Card

The Agent Card is a JSON document that serves as a digital "business card" for an A2A Server (the remote agent). It is crucial for agent discovery and interaction. The key information included in an Agent Card is as follows:

  • Identity: Includes name, description, and provider information.
  • Service Endpoint: Specifies the url for the A2A service.
  • A2A Capabilities: Lists supported features such as streaming or pushNotifications.
  • Authentication: Details the required schemes (e.g., "Bearer", "OAuth2").
  • Skills: Describes the agent's tasks using AgentSkill objects, including id, name, description, inputModes, outputModes, and examples.

Client agents use the Agent Card to determine an agent's suitability, structure requests, and ensure secure communication.

Sample Agent Card

{
  "protocolVersions": ["1.0"],
  "name": "GeoSpatial Route Planner Agent",
  "description": "Provides advanced route planning, traffic analysis, and custom map generation services. This agent can calculate optimal routes, estimate travel times considering real-time traffic, and create personalized maps with points of interest.",
  "supportedInterfaces": [
    {"url": "https://georoute-agent.example.com/a2a/v1", "protocolBinding": "JSONRPC"},
    {"url": "https://georoute-agent.example.com/a2a/grpc", "protocolBinding": "GRPC"},
    {"url": "https://georoute-agent.example.com/a2a/json", "protocolBinding": "HTTP+JSON"}
  ],
  "provider": {
    "organization": "Example Geo Services Inc.",
    "url": "https://www.examplegeoservices.com"
  },
  "iconUrl": "https://georoute-agent.example.com/icon.png",
  "version": "1.2.0",
  "documentationUrl": "https://docs.examplegeoservices.com/georoute-agent/api",
  "capabilities": {
    "streaming": true,
    "pushNotifications": true,
    "stateTransitionHistory": false,
    "extendedAgentCard": true
  },
  "securitySchemes": {
    "google": {
      "openIdConnectSecurityScheme": {
        "openIdConnectUrl": "https://accounts.google.com/.well-known/openid-configuration"
      }
    }
  },
  "security": [{ "google": ["openid", "profile", "email"] }],
  "defaultInputModes": ["application/json", "text/plain"],
  "defaultOutputModes": ["application/json", "image/png"],
  "skills": [
    {
      "id": "route-optimizer-traffic",
      "name": "Traffic-Aware Route Optimizer",
      "description": "Calculates the optimal driving route between two or more locations, taking into account real-time traffic conditions, road closures, and user preferences (e.g., avoid tolls, prefer highways).",
      "tags": ["maps", "routing", "navigation", "directions", "traffic"],
      "examples": [
        "Plan a route from '1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA' to 'San Francisco International Airport' avoiding tolls.",
        "{\"origin\": {\"lat\": 37.422, \"lng\": -122.084}, \"destination\": {\"lat\": 37.7749, \"lng\": -122.4194}, \"preferences\": [\"avoid_ferries\"]}"
      ],
      "inputModes": ["application/json", "text/plain"],
      "outputModes": [
        "application/json",
        "application/vnd.geo+json",
        "text/html"
      ]
    },
    {
      "id": "custom-map-generator",
      "name": "Personalized Map Generator",
      "description": "Creates custom map images or interactive map views based on user-defined points of interest, routes, and style preferences. Can overlay data layers.",
      "tags": ["maps", "customization", "visualization", "cartography"],
      "examples": [
        "Generate a map of my upcoming road trip with all planned stops highlighted.",
        "Show me a map visualizing all coffee shops within a 1-mile radius of my current location."
      ],
      "inputModes": ["application/json"],
      "outputModes": [
        "image/png",
        "image/jpeg",
        "application/json",
        "text/html"
      ]
    }
  ],
  "signatures": [
    {
      "protected": "eyJhbGciOiJFUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpPU0UiLCJraWQiOiJrZXktMSIsImprdSI6Imh0dHBzOi8vZXhhbXBsZS5jb20vYWdlbnQvandrcy5qc29uIn0",
      "signature": "QFdkNLNszlGj3z3u0YQGt_T9LixY3qtdQpZmsTdDHDe3fXV9y9-B3m2-XgCpzuhiLt8E0tV6HXoZKHv4GtHgKQ"
    }
  ]
}