The document discusses the evolution of API design from early standards like XML-RPC and SOAP to modern standards like REST and GraphQL. It outlines some limitations of REST APIs like underfetching and overfetching data through multiple requests. GraphQL is presented as a new API standard that was developed by Facebook to address these issues by allowing clients to fetch data from multiple resources through a single endpoint and request. Key features of GraphQL like declarative data fetching and a strong type system are also summarized.