13 Tool use and function calling
This chapter covers
- How models are trained to use tools
- Why tools mitigate structural weaknesses of language models
- What to consider when giving your model tools
Language models using tools is a natural way to expand their capabilities, especially for high-precision tasks where external tools contain the information or for agents that need to interact with complex web systems. Tool use is a skill that language models need to be trained to have, and RLHF and all the other methods presented in this book can refine it. Consider a question from a user, such as
A language model without tools will have a hard time answering this question due to the knowledge cutoff of pretraining data, but the information is readily accessible with one search query. Consider another example:
This is a task that the model weights alone cannot even attempt—the use of tools enables language models to address a far broader range of tasks.