- Given their anti-trust struggles, if Google for some reason dominates AI, they'd not want people to bring up anti-competitive behavior as a reason for that. Adopting open standards, especially open standards conceived outside Google is good for everyone including Google. They're well placed - from research to hardware to software and data.
They'll also want the industry to rapidly move forward and connect data to AI. MCP has momemtum.
- Looks similar to most other mid-level remote procedure call protocols, from XMLRPC to CORBA.
The usual sync, async, poll, progress test problems apply.
Things I'd expected to see and didn't:
- Client to server: "tell me what you can do". This has always been hard, but in the LLM era, it could potentially work, because a textural response would work.
- Similarly, being able to ask "How do I..." might be feasible now. It should be possible to talk to a new server and automatically figure out how to use it.
- "How much is this going to cost me?" Plus some way to set a cost limit on a query.
- I'm kind glad that the industry is distracted by vibe-coding, "tools" and MCP.
It's so clearly a dead-end. It gives freethinking developers and innovators time to focus on the next generation of software.
by lawrenceyan
1 subcomments
- It doesn't really matter what it is as there are many equally good implementations, but whoever sets up the framework first and cements usage is likely to guarantee dominance for the foreseeable future. Probably into AGI and post.
Model Context Protocol seems good enough to me.
- I hope Gemini gets a desktop app where MCP servers are more useful, but wonder if Google's security posture allows it.
by mellosouls
1 subcomments
- Related, discussion on A2A from the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631381
"The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)", 279 comments
- I hope they also improve their JSONSchema support for structured output and tool calling. Currently it has many limitations compared to OpenAI’s, for example it doesn’t support “additionalProperties” which eliminates an entire class of use cases and makes it immediately incompatible with many MCP servers.
Marketing the API as OpenAI-compatible and then me getting 400s when I switch to Gemini leaves a sour taste in the mouth, and doesn’t make me confident about their MCP support.
- Google owns 14% of Anthropic, author of MCP.
- Does MCP solve authentication on user's behalf which stifled OpenAI's GPTs?
Tools often need access to data sources but I don't want to hard code passwords.
- Every time I see MCP I think of the Unisys mainframe OS.
It runs on x86 processors (under emulation), so it'd make some sense if Google offered it as an option in Google Cloud. Maybe they could offer OS2000, GCOS, and GECOS as well.
- Well, Google is one of the major investors in Anthropic, so I'm not surprised.
- They have a chance to come-up with a user-friendly framework on top of MCP and make a big difference in acceleration of adoption. Cherry on the cake would be if they can build a UI on top of it to build/monitor/visualize. Hosted by them with a generous free-tier i.e. more private data to munch on for ads (only half joking).
by edandersen
0 subcomment
- Are they going to release a Gemini desktop app with MCP support so normal people can use it?
by whalesalad
0 subcomment
- it's wild to me how rapidly this has exploded in popularity. there's even a twitter account/site dedicated to news updates - https://x.com/getMCPilled and mcpilled.com
by phildougherty
1 subcomments
- interested to see if Agent-to-Agent protocol duplicates the MCP functionality eventually
- It’s terribly insecure as-is [1]. But so was HTTP. The spec isn’t final, so hopefully it will improve.
[1] https://blog.sshh.io/p/everything-wrong-with-mcp
by stevenalowe
2 subcomments
- Master Control Program?
by bluSCALE4
1 subcomments
- Anyone else wish Google would just stay away from MCP? They manage to ruin everything.
- Is there a good place to read on what the benefit of MCP is? I'm behind the curve on this agentic AI shit and am not quite sure where to look
by curtisszmania
0 subcomment
- [dead]
- Didn't Google introduce A2A just few days ago? Why Google itself is not heavily invested in their protocol?
Smells like a new project in Killed By Google graveyard.
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