Comment by seydor 3 days ago
I m optimistic, because LLMs can understand plain language. MCP won't last as the article correctly states, but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever. And companies cannot block you from doing that as long as it is your own PC / Phone.
If we do allow companies to block AI agents from accessing our own computers and data, then the users are to blame for falling again into another BigTech trap.
I think the demand for this will actually kill closed ecosystems like iOS. I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it. They won't be able to get it right because every integration will have to be canned while companies giving the LLMs/users a shell will allow them to do anything. People get confused because that used to not matter, most users couldn't do anything with a shell. That's no longer the case with LLMs.
> I feel strongly enough about this that I'm shorting Apple over it.
How long do you think it will take for this to meaningfully override Apple's share price?
I think it's already starting. Apple can't produce anything people just have to have anymore because of the attitude that's causing this. You can see this in their sales numbers.
I am completely uninterested to going back to the privacy-stealing, ad-infested nightmare that is Android. Besides, what would I even gain? iOS 25 just got live translation in calls and item extraction from screen (not just photos). So what am I missing?
I think you’re extrapolating too much from the enthusiasm of early adopters? There is widespread skepticism about AI. A lot of people aren’t that eager to use it and resent having new AI features pushed on them by overenthusiastic vendors.
Maybe users would rather keep their data safe than have it exfiltrated by a confused AI?
> but you will always be able to say to your AI to open your email and search whatever.
Can you actually even do that today? Not on iOS, I presume, definitely not on Android, at least not without hacking it six ways to Sunday with Tasker and Termux and API access to LLM providers.
(And no, firing Gemini and asking it to kindly maybe search your GMail doesn't count - because GMail is not the only e-mail provider, and GMail app is not the only e-mail client. If I want this to be possible with FastMail as provider and FairEmail as the app, it's hack o'clock again.)
Vendors all across the board really hate to give users useful features, because useful features tend to side-step their monetization efforts. And if history is any lesson, they'll find ways to constrain and shut down general-purpose use of LLMs. "Security" and "privacy" were the main fig leafs used in the past, so watch out for any new "improvements" there.
MCPs are, in part, a response to the difficulties LLM companies had when trying out LLMs interact online by visually navigation the screen.
They need APIs for it to be efficient. For whatever reason they didn't choose to use accessibility tooling to automate agents, and we haven't written REST APIs for 20+ years - they're left hoping a newly designed protocol will fix it.
> For whatever reason they didn't choose to use accessibility tooling to automate agents
That surprises me too. It's arguably the only way forward that has a chance of surviving for more than a moment, because accessibility actually has a strong cultural and (occasionally) legal backing, so companies can't easily close that off.
I was genuinely (maybe naively) impressed when google pushed for https everywhere. Maybe there were nefarious reason behind it that I missed, but it did a lot of good for the average web user.
LLM companies could easily have made a similar impact by leaning on accessibility tooling. Pushing companies to better support ARIA standards online would have made a huge impact for the better.
Heck, throw a little of that LLM money towards browser vendors to even better support ARIA - personally I'd love to see a proper API for directly accessing the accessibility tree.
> LLM companies could easily have made a similar impact by leaning on accessibility tooling. Pushing companies to better support ARIA standards online would have made a huge impact for the better.
If anything, they'd have the reverse impact, unfortunately. The thing is, the companies whose sites/apps/resources would be accessed by LLMs don't want this. That's the entire point of the article we're discussing.
All I'm saying is, accessibility is the only interoperability wedge they can't just close off, without a huge community backlash and in some cases because of compliance reasons.
Yeah that's totally fair, I diverted a bit and was only thinking about companies I actually see wanting to support external LLMs with APIs.
Expedia makes sense, for example, and it'd be nice if they had more of a reason to improve accessibility on their site rather than building out and maintaining an API service specifically for MCP.
I am less optimistic. Even paid products like Netflix or the Amazon Kindle are ad-monetized now.
I think the current useful state of consumer LLMs is a temporary subsidy, and the incentives to add ads are too large. And that will change everything, even tools that should work for the user. I recently wrote a blog post on this: https://digitalseams.com/blog/the-ai-lifestyle-subsidy-is-go...