Is Model Context Protocol the New API?

MCP has emerged as the AI-native standard for continuing on the path started by previous standards like REST, SOAP and XML-RPC. It simplifies connecting data and tools to LLMs, obviating the time-consuming need to create specific integrations, connectors or prompts for each database, tool or cloud service. MCP provides a well-defined contract for which tools and capabilities are available, and a rich semantic description of how they can be used, making chat clients extremely powerful. The protocol is designed to step into the gap between retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and capabilities-oriented approaches, providing a structured way of describing APIs, services, tools or capabilities to an agent so it knows how to use them. MCP enables AI agents to make decisions about which tools to use, in the right order to accomplish a task, and facilitates software's ability to talk to software, much like APIs have facilitated communication between different systems in previous technology waves.

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