The speaker, Theodora Chu, a product manager at Anthropic, introduces the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and shares her background as a startup founder in the AI space.
She aims to explain the origin of MCP, its utility, and answer common questions about its value.
MCP was created by the co-founders after noticing the inefficiency of constantly copying and pasting context from external sources into the context window during workflows.
The initiative aimed to provide models with agency to interact with the external world, leading to the decision to develop an open-source standardized protocol.
MCP was launched during a company hack week in November of the previous year and gained traction among engineers who began automating their workflows with it.
Initial reactions included confusion about MCP's purpose and questions about the need for a new protocol, which persisted until builders could experiment with it.
Significant adoption by coding tools like Cursor, VS Code, and Source Graph contributed to growing momentum and established MCP as a standard in the ecosystem.
The speaker emphasizes that standards become valuable through utility to builders and encourages community contributions for improvement.
Recent updates include support for streamable HTTP for better bi-directional communication and the introduction of elicitation to allow servers to gather more user information.
Development focuses on improving developer experience, establishing open-source examples, and ensuring MCP remains open and community-driven.
The speaker outlines areas for startups to explore, emphasizing the need for higher quality servers, tools for simplifying server building, and expansion into various verticals beyond development.
She mentions the potential for automated MCP server generation as models become more intelligent and the importance of AI security tools in the ecosystem.