LLMs

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a standardized approach for structuring context information when working with Large Language Models (LLMs). It was introduced by Anthropic but is standardised and an open protocol. Yeah, great. But what does that even mean? The problem that MCP is trying to solve is one of getting access to local/specialist information. When using Claude or ChatGPT etc, the model has access to its built in knowledge from training, but this only contains public information and will have a cut off date when the model was trained. To get around this, some tools have integrated web search that can add extra knowledge and/or the ability to import documents. But what if you want to talk to a database? Or files on disk? Or a knowledge base? Or … ...

Now Deep Research is available to ChatGPT users on the £20/mth tier, I’ve had a chance to experiment. The tl;dr is that it’s really very good, and the level of progress in just 6 months is mind-blowing. I picked something I know about - financial pressures facing UK Universities. First, I asked ChatGPT to generate the prompt for Deep Research, using this template I found via a mailing list (and I can’t remember which one). ...