To be fair, after visiting some trade shows recently, a lot of these “parasitic” LLM startups are not very convincing from a business-use case perspective. (They’re not really parasitic, more like a remora attaching itself to a shark, the shark being OpenAI or Anthropic).

At IMTS at Chicago the skepticism amongst the visitors towards AI and pure-AI startups was at an all-time high. More than once I heard, “Oh yeah I visited that AI booth and they couldn’t explain what value they would add to my business.”

So in that sense, while MCPs are “winning”, I also see them as a significant part of the AI “bubble”, specifically solutions looking for problems backed by VC money.