$$M+N$$

Equation 3 · AI Infrastructure

How Tool Protocols and the Model Context Protocol Actually Work

This mathematical expression combines the displayed quantities; its precise role follows from the surrounding article text.

A language model, on its own, cannot query a database, read a file, or send an email. It can only emit tokens. Everything past that point — recognising that the tokens describe a request, finding something willing to carry it out, running it, and getting an answer back into the conversation — has to be built by something else. For most of the history of chatbots, that “something else” was bespoke: one company wired its assistant to its own ticketing system with a few hundred lines of glue code that nobody else could reuse. Anthropic’s framing when it published the Model Context Protocol in November 2024 was explicit about the resulting shape of the problem: models remain “isolated from data,…

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Equation 8 · AI Infrastructure

How AI Models Learned to Use Tools: A Protocol History

This mathematical expression combines the displayed quantities; its precise role follows from the surrounding article text.

The assumption a shared protocol is betting on is that the fixed cost of building and maintaining the standard itself is smaller than the integrations it removes, and that those removed integrations were genuinely redundant rather than differently necessary. When M and N are both large and still growing, the gap between M $\times$ N and M + N dominates every other consideration; when either is small — a single application talking to a handful of tools it controls — a bespoke integration can still be cheaper than adopting a shared protocol at all, and treating standardization as free in that case would be cargo-culting rather than economizing.

Meanings in this article

• $M$: the when.
• $N$: both large and still growing, the gap between M $\times$ N and M + N dominates every other consideration.

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