It's being made out to be something bigger/more important than what it is to create hype and investment interest. Is it incredibly useful? Yes. But it's not aliens landing on the front lawn of the White House offering us anti-gravity tech.
If they said what it really was (see my other comment in this thread [1]), they couldn't leverage it to make more money/get more investors.
Is not correct. MCP can work very well with a RAG system, providing a standard way to add context to a model call, but itself doesn't do any Retrieval.
Over the years there have been a huge variety of ways information such as tool use, RAG context, and other prompting information has been communicated to the model (very often using some ad hoc approach). MCP seeks to clarify and standardize how that information is communicated to an from the model. This, as the poster points out, allows you to reuse tools, RAG, etc with any supporting model rather than hacking these together to work with each on individually.
Previously you would have had to come up with your own way to add the retrieved metadata from RAG to the model, use the vendor specific method of tool calling and then write you own method of tool dispatch once a tool call has been returned.
> Is not correct. MCP can work very well with a RAG system, providing a standard way to add context to a model call, but itself doesn't do any Retrieval.
That's misrepresentation of what I said. I didn't say that MCP replaces RAG, just that it's essentially a RAG system with some syntax sugar on top (which your response confirms).
It's great that it adds some standardization to the process of implementing RAG, but under the hood that's the engine of MCP.
If they said what it really was (see my other comment in this thread [1]), they couldn't leverage it to make more money/get more investors.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44065739