Ollama now supports tool calling with popular models in local LLM

Ollama provides an API endpoint that now supports the ability for an LLM to use tools/functions. Ollama is not a framework itself.

Agent Zero already can use Ollama and alternatives to run the LLMs, and this new feature should enable it to more accurately call tools that is getting built into the models that support it.

> My guess since programmer blog post writing (plus autism?) assumes “Everyone already knows everything about my project because I do!”…

Really unnecessary and distasteful to speculate like this. Just ask your question if you don't understand something.

> Is this to the effect of running a local LLM,

Yes. That is what ollama does.

> that reads your prompt

Yes.

> and then decides which correct/specialized LLM to hand it off to?

No. It does not hand it to a correct/specialized LLM. (or in general that is not the interesting use case) It hands it off to a traditionally coded program. Something written without any AI in it. This traditionally coded program does some job for the AI agent and then returns a result to it. The AI agent using that can use the result to answer the prompt.

Imagine as an example a calculator. Imagine if you want the AI to answer the following prompt: "How much will I have to pay if I bought an apple $2 and two bananas ($3 each) and the sales tax is 3%?"

To answer that question the LLM has to perform three steps: 1; understand that the above text stands for (2+23)1.03 and 2; perform the arithmetic correctly. 3; format the answer in an appropriate way (For example "You will have to pay 8 dollars and a quarter for tax.")

You can try to train an LLM which does all 3 steps internally. It parses the input and outputs the output. But in general you will have a lot of trouble with that approach.

So instead that you train the LLM to parse the prompt and output something like "3)1.03>" Then your UI intercepts this output from the LLM and recognises that it is asking for a tool to be used. In this case it is trying to use the "calculator" tool with the parameter "(2+23)1.03". So your UI doesn't display anything to the user but passes the "(2+23)1.03" to a traditionally coded binary/script. That script calculates the result using normally programmed logic. Then the UI prompts the LLM again this time the prompt contains the initial prompt text, the LLM's call for the tool, and the output of the tool. Now the LLM can just see the right response in front of it, and using the full context of the original prompt formats an answer.

What can a tool do? Anything really. It can open the pod bay door. It can reach out to a database. It can use a geo api to plan a route between two cities. It can read a wikipedia entry. It can write to a knowledge base. It can activate a nuclear bomb. Whatever is appropriate in your use case.

It's up to the implementation to determine what running a tool actually means: "tool-use" means you can tell the LLM "you have these functions which take these options", and then it can output a magic stanza asking the code conversing with the LLM to invoke one of those functions with the given parameters.

You COULD do dangerous things, but it's not like the LLM is constructing code it runs on its own.

Well often the code at the end of the day just reads data from a database or processes it in some way that relies on moving bits around / operations that the LLM on its own cannot do.

IMO Tool is a bad word for the majority of the use cases ("calculator", "weather API"). It's more like giving the LLM an old school calculator + a constrained data retriever.

Because you or somebody you entrust knows every line of code in the functions ultimately called at a high-ish level, you can do it, and know it is only really receiving data, not taking arbitrary action.

Now letting it rampantly run a python process arbitrarily etc, that'd be different, I suppose that fits in. But I think this is largely NOT how people are using tools since if you do that, how do you ever usefully know how to get the output of running it and apply that output?

Nit pick, but function calling, which is essentially what Tools are(an earlier evolution), was released before GPT-4-o, in June 2023.

https://openai.com/index/function-calling-and-other-api-upda...