AI + a16z

MCP Co-Creator on the Next Wave of LLM Innovation

May 2, 2025

David Soria Parra, creator of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) at Anthropic, shares his insights on revolutionizing AI applications. He discusses how MCP enables seamless integration of AI with existing tools, likening it to the API ecosystem. The conversation highlights innovative uses of MCP in creative tools like Blender and Ableton, fostering new artistic expressions. Furthermore, they delve into how agents communicate, balancing natural and programming languages, and underscore the importance of community participation in evolving this groundbreaking protocol.

53:39

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Episode guests

David Soria Parra

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Episode notes

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Quick takeaways

The Model Context Protocol (MCP) enables developers to create extensible AI applications by facilitating seamless integration with external workflows through a standardized interface.

MCP has inspired innovative use cases such as controlling browsers and automating daily tasks, showcasing its potential to merge technology with creative expression.

Active community engagement is crucial for advancing MCP's capabilities, encouraging collaboration and diverse contributions to enhance features like sampling and resource management.

Deep dives

Defining an Agent

An agent is described as an entity capable of multi-step reasoning and autonomous task-solving, which indicates a level of agency over its own actions. This definition emphasizes the importance of context and the agent's ability to adapt its responses based on previous interactions. The discussion briefly highlights that even the simplest systems can exhibit agent-like behavior if they can react to inputs, reinforcing the notion that complexity in agents is not always necessary. This perspective provides a framework for understanding how agents operate within various workflows and applications.

Intro

3min

Innovative Protocols: Enhancing Communication with MCP

20min

Unlocking MCP Resources and Prompts

11min

Revolutionizing Creativity with MCP

5min

Exploring Optimal Communication Modalities for Agents

3min

Exploring Innovations in AI: From Tamagotchis to ASCII Art

1min

Evolving Agents and Coding Specifications

7min

Cultivating Community Engagement in Open Protocol Development

3min

In this episode of AI + a16z, Anthropic's David Soria Parra — who created MCP (Model Context Protocol) along with Justin Spahr-Summers — sits down with a16z's Yoko Li to discuss the project's inception, exciting use cases for connecting LLMs to external sources, and what's coming next for the project. If you're unfamiliar with the wildly popular MCP project, this edited passage from their discussion is a great starting point to learn:

David: "MCP tries to enable building AI applications in such a way that they can be extended by everyone else that is not part of the original development team through these MCP servers, and really bring the workflows you care about, the things you want to do, to these AI applications. It's a protocol that just defines how whatever you are building as a developer for that integration piece, and that AI application, talk to each other.

"It's a very boring specification, but what it enables is hopefully ... something that looks like the current API ecosystem, but for LLM interactions."

Yoko: "I really love the analogy with the API ecosystem, because they give people a mental model of how the ecosystem evolves ... Before, you may have needed a different spec to query Salesforce versus query HubSpot. Now you can use similarly defined API schema to do that.

"And then when I saw MCP earlier in the year, it was very interesting in that it almost felt like a standard interface for the agent to interface with LLMs. It's like, 'What are the set of things that the agent wants to execute on that it has never seen before? What kind of context does it need to make these things happen?' When I tried it out, it was just super powerful and I no longer have to build one tool per client. I now can build just one MCP server, for example, for sending emails, and I use it for everything on Cursor, on Claude Desktop, on Goose."

Learn more:

A Deep Dive Into MCP and the Future of AI Tooling

What Is an AI Agent?

Benchmarking AI Agents on Full-Stack Coding

Agent Experience: Building an Open Web for the AI Era

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David Soria Parra

Yoko Li

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