Yes, we do need MCP // Benjamin Hindman

Recently, we’ve heard smart people we respect say things like: “There's a lot of buzz around MCP. I'm not convinced it needs to exist.” In this talk, we will argue that MCP differs from other modern protocols like gRPC and HTTP primarily due to its inherent statefulness. And, that this statefulness is required to bring about the rich, intelligent, long-lived, human-like communication that we want with AI. It is a feature, not a bug. Consider a human-to-human phone conversation: you're on the phone, the call drops, and you dial back. You don’t expect to begin your conversation all over again. Instead, you'd anticipate resuming from where you left off, or at least very close to it. To achieve something similar from human-to-computer, the protocol needs ways to pick up where the chat left off. More so than schemas and a clean separation of prompts, resources, and tools, this is what excites us the most about MCP. This talk will explore the aspects of MCP that enable fault-tolerance as well as features that have remained relatively obscure like elicitation (which enables the MCP server to ask questions or elicit feedback from humans), and sampling (which enables the MCP server to invoke the LLM itself). We will also discuss the current MCP client landscape as well as some important SEPs (Specification Enhancement Proposals) coming down the pike, like SEP-1391, in which we have been involved.