Google to embrace MCP
56 comments
·April 10, 2025Animats
mgraczyk
cost isn't part of MCP in the same way that cost isn't part of HTTP. It wouldn't really make sense to include that in the protocol, just put it in the application layer on top.
hansvm
It's a little different. These are systems which are explicitly able to achieve better or worse outcomes by tuning the cost, in ways that aren't especially configurable otherwise. For an HTTP API, you can read the docs and use the small image vs large image endpoint or whatever and have a clear idea of what you're getting and for what cost. For LLMs, it would be very nice to be able to communicate about the desired and actual cost breakdowns for each sub-action.
mgraczyk
It would also be nice to do that for http for the same reason. You can also read the find Docs for your MCP, and the LLM can also read the docs
boleary-gl
Especially since the cost in some (most?) cases won’t be from the MCP server but from the LLM using it
b0b0b0b
Http 402: “my time to shine”
Spivak
The first one is included, you can ask for available actions as well as mcp sever feature support. Is there something else that's missing?
cyanydeez
honestly, it looks like an unnecessary additional protocol to a REST API. Couldn't you just add a "LLM-description" (optional) field to any RESTAPI that provides a JSON description of how to use it? That's what it sounds like because every LLM already will have it's own "idea" of how to use a MCP interface. So why have a totally disparate thing.
Just seems like i+1 syndrome with computing.
jeswin
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.
phh
To escape the anti-trust struggles, they'll need to provide MCP servers (meaning provide callable tools). Stopping at providing MCP client (the chatbot that connects to MCP servers) isn't enough.
I'll believe in Google not actively being anti-competitive when I (a paying customer) can access/modify my gmail, google contacts, google sheets, plan routes in google maps, ... from my local llm chatbot using mcp.
Tyr42
I mean, people already have MCP wrappers around the Gmail API.
jappgar
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.
willemlaurentz
Spot on. Decided to get myself a ThreeJS book instead of vibing my way through. Wrote this post on it: https://willem.com/blog/2025-04-15_vibe-coding/
lawrenceyan
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.
bn-l
The idea behind smolagents is better.
vineyardmike
I agree the idea seems much better - and I think it's what a lot of big-shops are doing internally too. An earlier article [1] showed that internally, gemini has a python sandbox it uses to call other google services.
I'm guessing the main limitation is that it's harder to orchestrate, especially on clients.
pgt
Google owns 14% of Anthropic, author of MCP.
karmasimida
No public information whether Google's investment in Anthropic leads to voting power though.
boleary-gl
I think we can assume even if it is any voting power, it’s far less than 14%. No startup growing like that would give up shares with the same voting rights as the founders
mellosouls
Related, discussion on A2A from the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631381
"The Agent2Agent Protocol (A2A)", 279 comments
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flakiness
I hope Gemini gets a desktop app where MCP servers are more useful, but wonder if Google's security posture allows it.
omneity
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.
rbanffy
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.
goosedragons
Meanwhile I think Tron...
noisy_boy
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).
oezi
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.
skeeter2020
it depends if you're using stdio or http. the former gets credentials from the environment and the latter oauth.
evantahler
check out arcade.dev for this!
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edandersen
Are they going to release a Gemini desktop app with MCP support so normal people can use it?
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.