Understanding the concept of tool use in agents
At its core, tool usage by an intelligent agent refers to the LLM agent’s capability of leveraging external resources or instrumentation to augment the agent’s inherent functionality and decision-making processes. This concept extends beyond the traditional notion of an agent as a self-contained (isolated) entity, relying solely on its internal knowledge (training data) and algorithms. Instead, it acknowledges the potential for agents to transcend their intrinsic limitations by strategically harnessing the power of external tools and systems.
For example, when you send a query (“What’s the weather?”) to an agent in isolation, the model is free to either respond with any made-up answer or it may respond that it doesn’t know how to find the weather. In this case, the agent will rely on the LLM’s training data, which will not have up-to-date information about real-time weather data. On...
