tool-using

Definition

Describes models that call external functions — a calculator, a search index, a code interpreter, an API — instead of producing every answer from their weights. It is the defining capability of agents, since it lets a model offload arithmetic and fetch information it was never trained on. The hard parts are not the calls themselves but the decisions around them: when to call, with what arguments, and what to do when the result is an error.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Walkthrough: ToolArtist — Search, Draw, or Redraw? The Image Agent That Decides for ItselfToolArtist: Tool-Using Unified Multimodal Models for Agentic Image Generation