← Glossary

Tool Use

Concept

Definition

The ability of an LLM to invoke external tools — web search, code execution, calculators, APIs — during inference. The model decides when and how to call tools, receives the result, and incorporates it into its response.

Related Terms

Function Calling

A structured capability where the model outputs a JSON object describing which function to call and with what arguments, rather than plain text. The calling application executes the function and feeds the result back. Standard in GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini.

Agent

An AI system that can autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks by calling tools, browsing the web, writing code, and interacting with external services — all without continuous human intervention.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open standard by Anthropic for connecting AI assistants to external data sources and tools. Defines a common interface so any MCP-compatible client (Claude, Cursor, etc.) can plug into any MCP-compatible server (databases, APIs, filesystems).

Articles about Tool Use

MiniMax-M1 brings 1M-token open reasoning model

Why LLM Leaderboards Are Wrong About Model Quality

Why Claude Code’s prompt design beats IDE copilots

Why Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2.5-Pro Changes Coding Agents More Than Chatbots

RAGFlow adds agents to open-source RAG

All Terms

AgentAttention MechanismChain-of-ThoughtContext WindowDiffusion ModelDistillationDPO (Direct Preference Optimization)EmbeddingFew-shot PromptingFine-tuningFunction CallingGAN (Generative Adversarial Network)GRPO (Group Relative Policy Optimization)HallucinationInferenceLLM (Large Language Model)LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation)MCP (Model Context Protocol)MultimodalPrompt EngineeringQLoRA (Quantized LoRA)QuantizationRAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback)TemperatureTokenizerTool UseTop-p (Nucleus Sampling)TransformerVector DatabaseZero-shot Prompting