Over the weekend, Automattic/Beeper had the pleasure of hosting and sponsoring the Build the Future MCP Hackathon in New York City organized by Adam Anzuoni, alongside Anthropic, Stainless, WorkOS, Smithery, and MongoDB. As someone deeply passionate about open-source technology and the potential of AI, I was thrilled to not only support this event but also to speak at it and serve as one of the judges. For those unfamiliar, MCP stands for Model Context Protocol and enables AI models to interact with multiple tools in a more efficient and structured manner, allowing developers to create sophisticated agents that can handle complex tasks. And it’s only 8 months old! The energy in the room was electric—hackers collaborating, iterating, and demoing groundbreaking projects in just a few hours. (I would love to see the results of a longer overnight or all-weekend hackathon.)

For a wrap-up of the winners, check out this great X/Twitter thread by Alex Reibman. The first-place winner, Levels AI, orchestrates different AI/ML models to solve specific business requirements without needing heavy manual coding or specialized teams. Essentially, it’s models creating more models—a meta-approach to AI that could streamline operations for companies of all sizes. Yusuf Olokoba said the name was inspired by Pieter Levels, which is pretty cool. I wanted to note one team in particular: BeepResearch, which used our early access Beeper API and local MCP.

Judging the entries was tough! People built so much cool stuff in a really short period of time. I always say technology is best when it brings people together, and this was a great example of that, and makes me very excited for Contributor Day at WordCamp US next week. (Which has such a stacked AI program as well.) Hopefully some people who enjoyed the office might consider getting 24/7 access.

I also just want to take a beat and say how amazing it is that I’m blogging this, on a United flight from Houston to San Francisco I’ve taken a million times, on a plane 36,000 feet in the air and technology is amazing. I can’t wait until United has Starlink!

Also last week the WordPress AI team shipped its MCP adapter!