[charcircuit]

I think you are underestimating the strength a small model can get from tool use. There may be no substitute for scale, but that scale can live outside of the model and be queried using tools.

In the worst case a smaller model could use a tool that involves a bigger model to do something.

[sroussey]

Small models are bad at tool use. I have liquidai doing it in the browser but it’s super fragile.

[dd8601fn]

I don’t really understand this, but I hear it a lot so I know it’s just confusion on my part.

I’m running little models on a laptop. I have a custom tool service made available to a simple little agent that uses the small models (I’ve used a few). It’s able to search for necessary tool functions and execute them, just fine.

My biggest problem has been the llm choosing not to use tools at all, favoring its ability to guess with training data. And once in a while those guesses are junk.

Is that the problem people refer to when they say that small models have problems with tool use? Or is it something bigger that I wouldn’t have run into yet?