tool-use

A New Caledonian crow can manufacture a hooked tool from a strip of wire it has never encountered before to retrieve food from a tube. A bottlenose dolphin calf recognizes itself in a mirror at seven months — something a human child cannot do until age two. Defining animal intelligence turns out to be one of the most revealing questions in all of science.

Tool use lets an LLM call one function. An agent runs a loop of reasoning and tool calls until done. Here's the real distinction.

Function calling and tool use are the same concept under different names. Learn how LLMs invoke external tools, with examples from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.