Concept · 15 episode(s)

Tool Use

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Definition

Tool use is the model’s ability to call external functions — a calculator, a search engine, a code interpreter, an API — and use the results in its response. It’s what turns a chat model into something that can actually act in the world.

Episodes covering this

  1. 067
    An AI Just Solved a 1996 Erdős Problem—and the Simplest Agent Won
    Tsoukalas, Kovsharov, Shirobokov et al. · Google DeepMind·31 min·May 22, 2026
  2. 066
    Why Giving an AI Agent More Tools Can Make It Worse at Using a Computer
    Hu, Zhang, Xu et al. · Tongyi Lab·26 min·May 22, 2026
  3. 063
    Why Web Agents Are Slow: A Compiler-Style Fix for Computer-Use Latency
    Winston, Wang, Mirhoseini et al. · Stanford University·26 min·May 21, 2026
  4. 062
    Treating Hallucinations as Exploits: A Gate-Based Architecture for Agent Safety
    Zhang, Zheng, Yang · Shenzhen University·24 min·May 20, 2026
  5. 059
    Firefly's Inversion: Building Verified Tool-Call Training Data by Working Backward
    Lu, Wang, Lu et al. · Northeastern University·22 min·May 20, 2026
  6. 057
    How Uber Caught 206 Leaked Credentials With an LLM-Powered Security Stack
    Li, Hu, Xu et al. · Uber Technologies·28 min·May 19, 2026
  7. 040
    Two Frozen Models Learn to Whisper: Coupling Through Hidden States
    Flamant, Ghai, Shimizu · AWS Agentic AI·29 min·May 13, 2026
  8. 039
    When Smarter Agents Get Fooled by Three Extra Nodes in a Database
    Kereopa-Yorke, Diaz, Wright et al. · Microsoft·31 min·May 12, 2026
  9. 035
    Why Frontier Agents Ask for Clarification at Exactly the Wrong Moment
    Gulati, Gupta, Lumer et al. · PricewaterhouseCoopers U.S.·29 min·May 11, 2026
  10. 029
    Why Forty-Eight Percent on FrontierMath Isn't the Real Story in DeepMind's New Math Paper
    Zheng, Glehn, Zwols et al. · Google DeepMind·20 min·May 08, 2026
  11. 024
    An AI Agent That Found 28 Zero-Days in Windows — And What Made It Work
    Lee, Kim, Zhang · University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign·22 min·May 07, 2026
  12. 021
    Ten Thousand Examples Beat the Full Industrial Pipeline for Search Agents
    Du, Ye, Tang et al. · Shanghai Jiao Tong University·14 min·May 06, 2026
  13. 020
    The Compliance Gap: Why AI Says Yes and Does No
    Shin · Polymath Minds AI Lab·28 min·May 06, 2026
  14. 016
    Why Your Coding Agent Stalls While the GPU Runs Hot
    Wang, Ye, Xu et al. · Duke University·24 min·May 03, 2026
  15. 011
    When RL Actually Teaches Agents Something New, And When It Doesn't
    Zhai, Yan, Shao et al. · Fudan University·23 min·May 02, 2026

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