This week on the a16z show, Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, made the point that developers have been “retooling the world” to make software more accessible to AI agents. But computer use could offer a simpler path forward. 

And for Brockman, simplicity is really the North Star for AI: “We really should be one AI that’s unified, that makes it so easy and smooth for you to be less engaging with the computer and less wrapping yourself around the computer.” 

MCP servers, CLIs, APIs, and other agent integrations help AI agents reach more tools, data, and software. But that wide access doesn’t come without some burden — at least that’s what it sounds like in Brockman’s conversation with Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg, hosts of the a16z show. As OpenAI’s president explains:

“What if it’s more behaving like a human? Can it just use a computer?”

“People have been building these MCP servers and these CLIs and just really sort of taking the world of software and making it accessible in this almost stilted way that is not really meant for humans,” he said. “It’s like we’re kind of retooling the world.”

How did we get here? “For agentic use cases, it really comes down to the tools,” said Brockman, indicating why MCP servers and other connectors have become so common. But if models can learn to use computers the same way that people do, then perhaps developers no longer need to keep building purpose-built integrations for every application.

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