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I personally wouldn't be surprised if the http calling abilities of LLMs end up killing MCP, or at least greatly reducing its use. If you train LLMs to start in

I personally wouldn't be surprised if the http calling abilities of LLMs end up killing MCP, or at least greatly reducing its use. If you train LLMs to start interacting with REST APIs as a great way to make them do more then a lot of the MCP use cases go away.

cable 1y ago
HATEOAS FTW
nunodonato 1y ago
I have a tool that builds HTTP requests. LLMs can use that just fine, IF they know the API spec they should connect to. And that is the problem. If you are then required to pass the specs of dozens of APIs, you are polluting the context with too much useless info. MCP simplifies that
- simiones 1y ago
  You also need an MCP schema to understand what the MCP server can actually do, there is no free lunch here.
  - nunodonato 1y ago
    yes, but in terms of token size its WAY cheaper for the AI to handle that than an OpenAPI spec
    - miningape 1y ago
      Isn't this more a limitation of the OpenAPI spec? Something like GraphQL would probably work much better
v3ss0n 1y ago
LLM already exist that capabilities since chatgpt GPT3.5 Just they don't have tools and then, tools are simply introduced by tool calling specs and it works fine already. MCP is a wrapper around that specs nothing new
IceDane 1y ago
You are fundamentally misunderstanding what is happening here and how this is all works. "HTTP calling abilities of LLMs" is not some magic, new feature that is deeply integrated into LLMs. It's just a tool call like everything else - i.e. you prompt the LLM to return a JSON object that conforms to a schema. MCP is also doing this exact same thing. It's just a wrapper protocol that tries to take care of all the details so that we don't have to deal with a million custom protocols that all accomplish the same thing but are all incompatible.
- jmward01 1y ago
  You are fundamentally misunderstanding the point I am making. LLMs have repeatedly started with training wheels and then slowly had them taken off as they have become more and more competent. MCP is another example of training wheels that will likely eventually go away. If the direct web/API calling abilities of LLMs were to improve with better trained models and some more built in support then MCP could go away and nobody would miss it.
  - IceDane 1y ago
    No, you are still not getting it. MCP will never go away, or at least something like it will always end up existing. What you are describing, "web api calling abilities were to improve" will not change anything. What sort of improvement are you thinking of? They can only get better at outputting json correctly, but that hasn't really been a problem for a long time now. Either way, it wouldn't change anything, because MCP is a 100 other things which doesn't have anything to do with the llms using tools directly. You will never embed everything that MCP can do "into" the llm - that barely even makes sense to talk about. It's not just a wire protocol.
kissgyorgy 1y ago
MCP was specifically created so LLMs can have a better understanding (better context). An app or user needs completely different endpoints than LLMs.
zingababba 1y ago
I mean the fact that I can bring an API spec, MCP protocol spec, and MCP SDK spec into context and say "make me an MCP server where each route equals a tool" and have that bootstrapped in <5 minutes as a starting point is pretty nice. Then you can just start chaining stuff together.

cable 1y ago

HATEOAS FTW

nunodonato 1y ago

I have a tool that builds HTTP requests. LLMs can use that just fine, IF they know the API spec they should connect to. And that is the problem. If you are then required to pass the specs of dozens of APIs, you are polluting the context with too much useless info. MCP simplifies that

simiones 1y ago
You also need an MCP schema to understand what the MCP server can actually do, there is no free lunch here.
- nunodonato 1y ago
  yes, but in terms of token size its WAY cheaper for the AI to handle that than an OpenAPI spec
  - miningape 1y ago
    Isn't this more a limitation of the OpenAPI spec? Something like GraphQL would probably work much better

v3ss0n 1y ago

LLM already exist that capabilities since chatgpt GPT3.5 Just they don't have tools and then, tools are simply introduced by tool calling specs and it works fine already. MCP is a wrapper around that specs nothing new

IceDane 1y ago

You are fundamentally misunderstanding what is happening here and how this is all works. "HTTP calling abilities of LLMs" is not some magic, new feature that is deeply integrated into LLMs. It's just a tool call like everything else - i.e. you prompt the LLM to return a JSON object that conforms to a schema. MCP is also doing this exact same thing. It's just a wrapper protocol that tries to take care of all the details so that we don't have to deal with a million custom protocols that all accomplish the same thing but are all incompatible.

jmward01 1y ago
You are fundamentally misunderstanding the point I am making. LLMs have repeatedly started with training wheels and then slowly had them taken off as they have become more and more competent. MCP is another example of training wheels that will likely eventually go away. If the direct web/API calling abilities of LLMs were to improve with better trained models and some more built in support then MCP could go away and nobody would miss it.
- IceDane 1y ago
  No, you are still not getting it. MCP will never go away, or at least something like it will always end up existing. What you are describing, "web api calling abilities were to improve" will not change anything. What sort of improvement are you thinking of? They can only get better at outputting json correctly, but that hasn't really been a problem for a long time now. Either way, it wouldn't change anything, because MCP is a 100 other things which doesn't have anything to do with the llms using tools directly. You will never embed everything that MCP can do "into" the llm - that barely even makes sense to talk about. It's not just a wire protocol.

kissgyorgy 1y ago

MCP was specifically created so LLMs can have a better understanding (better context). An app or user needs completely different endpoints than LLMs.

zingababba 1y ago

I mean the fact that I can bring an API spec, MCP protocol spec, and MCP SDK spec into context and say "make me an MCP server where each route equals a tool" and have that bootstrapped in <5 minutes as a starting point is pretty nice. Then you can just start chaining stuff together.