Definition
Plain language
Salesforce's family of small language models fine-tuned to be especially good at calling tools.
As stated in the literature
A Salesforce model series post-trained on tool-use conversational data, used in agent-training comparisons.
Why it matters: It demonstrates that small, focused models can compete with much larger ones on tool use, which matters for cost-sensitive agent deployments.
For example, an xLAM model fine-tuned for function calling might cleanly produce structured JSON arguments where a base model would ramble.
Heard on the show
“There's a model family called xLAM.”Episode 071 — When the Model Is Fine and the Plumbing Is Broken: Fixing Agents at the Interface