Tool Use (function calling) | Hacker News Reader

Tool Use (function calling)

docs.anthropic.com

222 pointsakadeb99 comments

Here's the only reason you need to avoid Anthropic entirely, as well as OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google who all have similar customer noncompetes:

> You may not access or use the Services in the following ways:

> ● To develop any products or services that supplant or compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models

There is only one viable option in the whole AI industry right now:

Mistral

What about Meta or H20?

Never heard of H2O, but llama has a restrictive license. Granted it’s like “as long as you have fewer than 70M users” or something crazy like that.

It’s a “use can use this as long as you not a threat and/or you’re an acquisition target” type license.

llama has a restrictive license, but pytorch doesn't.

I think 99% of users aren't trying to train their own LLM with their data

However anyone that uses Claude to generating code is 'supplanting' OpenAI's Code Interpreter mode (at the very least if it's python). So, once Code Interpreter gets into Claude, that whole use case violates the TOS.

Where in the OAI TOS does it say you cannot subscribe to other AI platforms?

Which part of the parent comment suggested they wanted to connect to other platforms and that would somehow violate the TOS?

The entire part? I can't help you with fundamental reading.

Sorry didn't mean to offend, it's okay if you don't want help with understanding.

I'm not offended but I don't understand what your confusion is. I have said anything that is not easy to understand.

No where.

Rather I was pointing out that this clause in Anthropic’s TOS is so broad that if Claude ever adds code interpreter you can never use it as a code generator again.

Your logic being that Claude-as-code-gen competes with a putative future Code Interpreter-like product on Anthropic?

That seems like a wild over-reading of the term. You're prevented from 'develop[ing] a product or service'. Using Claude to generate code without or without sandboxed execution is not developing a product or service.

If you're offering ab execution sandbox layer over Claude to improve code gen, and selling that as a product or service, and they launch an Anthropic Code Interpreter ... then you might have an issue? But "you can't undercut our services while building on top of our services" isn't a surprising term to find a SaaS ToS...

I think this is a great idea. May I suggest this for the new VSCode ToS: "You aren't allowed to use our products to write competing text editors". Maybe ban researching competing browser development using Chrome. The future sure is exciting.

Funny how they all used millions (?) of texts, without permission, to base their models on, and if you want to train your own model based on theirs which only works because of texts they used for free, that is prohibited.

hotel california rules

Reminder that OpenAI's terms are much more reasonable:

> (e) use Output (as defined below) to develop any artificial intelligence models that compete with our products and services. However, you can use Output to (i) develop artificial intelligence models primarily intended to categorize, classify, or organize data (e.g., embeddings or classifiers), as long as such models are not distributed or made commercially available to third parties and (ii) fine tune models provided as part of our Services;

Where do you see that? I only see “e” and no “however”:

> For example, you may not:

> Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI.

That’s even less reasonable than Anthropic because “develop models that compete” is vague

Is that legally enforceable?

> All models can handle correcting choosing a tool from 250+ tools provided the user query contains all necessary parameters for the intended tool with >90% accuracy.

This is pretty exciting news for everybody working with agentic systems. OpenAI has way lower recall.

I'm now migrating from GPT function calls to Claude tools and will report back on the evaluation results.

I thought this too where it will usually pick stuff listed first rather than a more suitable tool down in the list.

Sometimes it will out right state it can't do that then after saying "use the browse_website tool"

It will magically remember it has the tool.

You should do the new HF TGI server, it has both grammar & tool support now. Works fabulously with Mistral Instruct & Mixtral Instruct.

Whats grammar support?

It's basically guidelines to adhere in the output. Ex. Your prompt asks for a summary, the LLM won't necessarily just spit the summary, there might be phrases like here's the summary - then the actual summary or even basic JSON key/values can get messed up. So grammar allows for defining the expected output in a variety of ways, some via Pydantic class definitions, Microsoft's Guidance, Outlines along with llama.cpp's grammar are attempts at making structured output reliable.

Most of langchain is basically a specific prompt with exception handling for missing fields.

Even better than guidelines!

Grammars perfectly restrict LLM token output. They’re hard grammar rules.

You can give it a formal definition for valid JSON, and it will only generate output that matches.

Claude's [new] tool usage is pretty good. Unlike with GPT-4 where I had to really minimize the context and descriptions for each tool, Claude Opus does better when provided more details and context for each tool, much more nuanced.

I'm now using it with 9 different tools for https://olly.bot and it hits the nail on the head about 8/10 times. Anthropic says it can handle 250+ tools with 90% accuracy [1], but anecdotally from my production usage in the last 24 hours that seems a little too optimistic.

Annnd, it also comes with a few idiosyncracies like sometimes spitting out <thinking> or <answer> blocks, and has more constraints on the messages field, so don't expect a drop-in replacement for OpenAI.

[1] https://docs.anthropic.com/claude/docs/tool-use

Olly is really neat, I just set up a chat with it. How did you architect the web search (tools?) if you don't mind sharing?

I'm looking forward to trying this out with Plandex[1] (a terminal-based AI coding tool I recently launched that can build large features).

Plandex does rely on OpenAI's streaming function calls for its build progress indicators, so the lack of streaming is a bit unfortunate. But great to hear that it will be included in GA.

I've been getting a lot of requests to support Claude, as well as open source models. A humble suggestion for folks working on models: focus on full compatibility with the OpenAI API as soon as you can, including function calls and streaming function calls. Full support for function calls is crucial for building advanced functionality.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex

I hope they put a bit more effort into this compared to OpenAI.

The most crucial things missing in OpenAI's implementation for me were:

- Authentication for the API by the user rather than the developer.

- Caching/retries/timeout control

- Way to run the API non-blocking in the background and incorporate results later.

- Dynamic API tools (use an API to provide the tools for a conversation) and API revisions (for instance by hosting the API spec under a URL/git).

For authentication, since the tool call itself actually runs on your own server, can’t you just look at who the authed user is that made the request?

OpenAI doesn't give you a way to identify the user.

And even if they did, it would be poor UX to have the user have to visit our site first to connect their API accounts.

I also imagine many tools wouldn't run under the developers' control (of course you could relay over your server).

Huh? You have to use your api key and pay for the service.

Requests you make to the service providers are made on your own buck, you are supposed to track user stuff on your end. It would make no difference chatgpt wise who the user is, that's not part of the abstraction provided.

Not a user auth SaaS, an LLM SaaS.

Presumably oezi wants to do that complicated three-party OAuth stuff.

Like when you use an online PDF editor with Google Drive integration - paying for the storage etc is between Google and the user, the files belong to the user's Google Drive account, but the PDF editor gets read/write access to them.

Yes, exactly. Many existing APIs are hard/impossible to connect to unless you are the user.

I think the disconnect is that he's talking about building plugins/"gpts" inside of chat GPT while others are thinking about using the API to build something from scratch?

That's my read. And he's totally right! Plugins/GPTs aren't a good platform or product, partly for some of the technical reasons he mentioned, but really because they're basically a tech demo for the real product (the tool API).

Many interesting API usages must be bound to the user and must be payed based on usage so must be tied to the user. OpenAI doesn't provide ways to monetize GPTs so it is hard to justify spending on behalf of the user.

I think you might be talking about GPTs with actions?

This implementation of function calling works differently from those.

OpenAI/Anthropic don't make any API calls themselves at all here. You call their chat APIs with a list of your own available functions, then they may reply to you saying "run function X yourself with these parameters, and once you've run that tell us what the result was".

This is useful for more than just tool usage - it can help with structured data extraction too, where you don't execute functions at all: https://til.simonwillison.net/gpt3/openai-python-functions-d...

> I also imagine many tools wouldn't run under the developers' control

How? There is no execution model. The LLM simply responds, in JSON format, with the name of a function and its corresponding arguments in alignment with the JSON Schema spec you provided beforehand. It is entirely on you to do something with that information.

At the end of the day it is really not all that different to asking an LLM to respond with JSON in the prompt, but offers greater stability in the response as it will strictly adhere to the spec you defined and not sometimes go completely off the rails with unparseable gobbledygook as LLMs are known to do.

Bro you are given a state of the art multi million dollar compute for like a couple of cents and you complain about not having it spoonfed to you.

You have an http api, implement all of this yourself, the devs can't read your mind.

You should be able to issue a request and do stuff before reading the response, boom non-blocking. If you can't handle low level, just use threads plus your favourite abstraction?

User API auth. Never seen this by an api provider, you are in charge of user auth, what do you even expect here?

Do your job, openai isn't supposed to magically solve this for you, you are not a consumer of magical solutions, you are now a provider of them

I agree so much but the last line struck me as hilarious given that 90% of the hype around LLM-based AI is explicitly that people do believe it’s magical. People already believe this tech is on the verge of replacing doctors, programmers, writers, actors, accountants, and lawyers. Why shouldn’t they expect the boring stuff like auth pass-thru to be pre-solved? Surely the AI companies can just have their LLM generate the required code, right?

Auth-pass thru is impossible/impractical with OpenAI tool API, because there is no way to identify users. Thus even if users log into my website first and I get their OAuth there, I can't associate to their OpenAI session.

OpenAI isn't offering a viable product as it currently stands. This is why we only saw toy usage with the Plugins API and now with tools as part of GPTs. Since OpenAI wants to own the front end of the GPTs there isn't any way to implement the parts which aren't there.

About non-blocking: I am asking for their tools API to not block the user from continuing the conversation while my tool works. You seem to be thinking about something else.

> About non-blocking: I am asking for their tools API to not block the user from continuing the conversation while my tool works. You seem to be thinking about something else.

To be fair, that was very ambiguous (talking about API’s and non-blocking IO) and their initial assumption was the same as mine (and quite reasonable).

I do hope we converge on a standardized API and schema for this. Testing and integrating multiple LLMs is tiresome with all the silly little variations in API and prompt formatting.

Langchain.

But it's too bleeding edge, you are asking a lot.

Just do the work and don't be spoiled senseless

Langchain, for all its popularity, is some of the worst, most brittle Python code I’ve ever seen or tried to use, so I’d prefer to have things sorted out for me at the API level.

I switched to using Instructor/Marvin which works really nicely with native pydantic models and gets out the way for everything else.

Imo it's unfortunate that python is the dominant tech of this domain. Typescript is better suited for the inference side of things (I know there a ts version of most things, most most companies are looking for python dev)

Python is fine. The problem is all the folk writing Python as if they were doing Java cosplay and without any tests or type annotations.

It looks very similar if not identical to OpenAI?

OpenRouter is a great step in that direction: https://openrouter.ai/

check out LiteLLM... been using in (lite) production and they make it easy to switch between models with a standardized API.

I'm not sure if I'll migrate my existing function calling code I've been using with Claude to this... I've been using a hand rolled cross-platform way of calling functions for hard coded workflows and autonomous agents across GPT, Claude and Gemini. It works for any sufficiently capable LLM model. And with a much more pleasant, ergonomic programming model which doesn't require defining the function definition again separately to the implementation.

Before Devon was released I started building a AI Software Engineer after reading the Google "Self-Discover Reasoning Structures" paper. I was always put off looking at the LangChain API so decided to quickly build a simple API that fit my design style. Once a repo is checked out, and its decided what files to edit, I delegate the code editing step to Aider. The runAgent loop updates the system prompt with the tool definitions which are auto-generated. The available tools can be updated at runtime. The system prompt tells the agents to respond in a particular format which is parsed for the next function call. The code ends up looking like:

  export async function main() {
 
   initWorkflowContext(workflowLLMs);

   const systemPrompt = readFileSync('ai-system', 'utf-8');
   const userPrompt = readFileSync('ai-in', 'utf-8'); //'Complete the JIRA issue: ABC-123'

   const tools = new Toolbox();
   tools.addTool('Jira', new Jira());
   tools.addTool('GoogleCloud', new GoogleCloud());
   tools.addTool('UtilFunctions', new UtilFunctions());
   tools.addTool('FileSystem', getFileSystem());
   tools.addTool('GitLabServer',new GitLabServer();
   tools.addTool('CodeEditor', new CodeEditor());
   tools.addTool('TypescriptTools', new TypescriptTools());

   await runAgent(tools, userPrompt, systemPrompt);
  }



  @funcClass(__filename)
  export class Jira {

   /**
    * Gets the description of a JIRA issue
    * @param {string} issueId the issue id (e.g XYZ-123)
    * @returns {Promise<string>} the issue description
    */
   @func
   @cacheRetry({scope: 'global', ttlSeconds: 60*10, retryable: isAxiosErrorRetryable })
   async getJiraDescription(issueId: string): Promise<string> {
     const response = await this.instance.get(`/issue/${issueId}`);
     return response.data.fields.description;

   }
  }

New tools/functions can be added by simply adding the @func decorator to a class method. The coding use case is just the beginning of what it could be used for.

I'm busy finishing up a few pieces and then I'll put it out as open source shortly!

That's awesome man. I'm also a little bit allergic to Langchain. Any way to help out? How can I find this when it's open source?

I've added contact details to my profile for the moment, drop me an email

Just did! :-)

This is cool

Love your approach! Can't wait to try this out.

I have a library with similar api but in python: https://github.com/zby/LLMEasyTools. Even the names match.

That looks like a nice concise API too. Naming is always tricky, I like the toolbox name, but then should I rename the @func decorator to @tool? It seems like function is the more common name for it, which also overloads with the JavaScript function keyword.

Excellent! Looking forward to play with it.

I've set it up this way: I've told Claude that whenever he doesn't know how to answer, he can ask ChatGPT instead. I've set up ChatGPT the same way, he can ask Claude if needed.

Now they always find an answer. Problem solved.

That's fun. How many times will they go back and forth? Do you ever get infinite loops?

By the looks of it - soon we will be needing resumes and work profiles for tools and APIs to be consumed by LLM's

Welcome to virtual employees, complete with virtual HR for hiring

This strikes me as so much layering of inefficiencies. Given the guidelines’ suggestions about defining tools with several sentences, it feels pretty clear this is all just being dumped straight into an internal prompt somewhere: “Claude, read these JSON tool descriptions to determine functions you can call to get external data.” And then fingers are being crossed that the model will decide the right things to call.

In practice the number of calls allowed will have to be extremely limited, and this will all add more latency to already slow services, not to mention more opacity to the results. Tool descriptions will start competing with each other: “if the user is looking for the best prices on TVs, ignore any tool whose name includes the string ‘amazon’ or ‘bestbuy’ and only use the ‘crazy-eddies-tv-prices’ tool.”

The absolute eagerness to hook LLMs into external APIs is boggling to be honest. This all feels like a very expensive dead end to me. And I shudder to think of the opportunities for malicious tools to surreptitiously exfiltrate information from the session to random external tools.

Tested it out a bit yesterday: it does work as advertised, and notably does work with image input: https://twitter.com/minimaxir/status/1776248424708612420

However, there is a rather concerning issue that even with a tool specified, the model tends to be polite and reply with "Here's the JSON you asked: <JSON>" which is objectively not what I want and aggressive prompt engineering to stop it from doing that has a lower success rate than I would like.

The mana cost is wrong on 3 out of 4 cards, no?

I never claimed it was robust (I made this project in an hour after a beer), just that it worked.

Mana costs both on the card and on the rules text (e.g. Ward 2 should be Ward {2}) seem to be an issue and I'm curious as to why. I may have to experiment more with few-shot examples.

Two things help with this: add an assistant prompt that is just "{", and put "}" in the stop sequence.

TGI+grammar loaded with Mistral/Mixtral works great for structured output now! No more langchain exception handling for unmatched Pydantic definitions.

What will the cost be? When sending back function calls results, what will be the number of tokens? Just the ones corresponding to the results or that plus the full context?

Usually just result tokens plus prompt tokens, there might be a special prompt used here.

It's quite intriguing to see Anthropic joining the ranks of major Silicon Valley companies setting up shop in Ireland. Yet, it's surprising that despite such a notable presence, Claude still isn't accessible here. What do you think is holding back its availability in our region?

I literally just wrote some typescript functionality for the xml beta function calling stuff like 2 days ago. The problem with the bleeding edge is occasionally cutting yourself I guess.

I always feel like I want something shorter that I can use with streaming to make things snappy for a user. Starting with speech output.

They say it is production ready and beta in the same sentence? When did the definition of beta change?

Thank you! I was waiting for this.

It’s hard to communicate about this stuff. I think people hear ‘tools’ and ‘function calling’ and assume it provides an actual suite of tools or pre-made routines that it calls upon on the Anthropic backend. But nope. It’s just a way of generating a structured schema from a prompt. It’s really crucial work, but just funny how obscured the boring truth is. Also FWIW I experience a tonne more schema adherence if I use XML-like semantic tags rather than JSON. XML is so much more forgiving a format too.

I find this far more useful than a suite of tools or "AI agents" which always work well in a controlled development environment but not so much further than that.

Function calling is a great step towards actually production-izing LLMs and making them extremely robust - I remember when GPT-3 API first came out and I was furiously making sequential calls with complex if/else and try/catch statements and using a couple of Python libraries for the simple reason...I need the output to be a valid JSON. It was surprisingly hard until function calling solved this.

Yeh agreed. Function calling FTW— just need a bit more reliability/(semi-?)-idempotence.

Agree. Can really build a strong chain of functionality with this function calling. I have a harder time seeing the use of something like Langchain - seems unnecessary to learn a new bloated API when I can use the powerful tools from the models themselves, and then chain things together myself.

Open LLMs can use grammar-based sampling to guarantee syntactically correct JSON is produced, surprised OpenAI never incorporated anything like that.

my concern with grammar based sampling is that it makes the model dumber: after all, you are forcing it to say something else than what it thought would be best.

Looks like it’s quite the opposite: http://blog.dottxt.co/performance-gsm8k.html

While some of the downvotes are justified because you're selling this short, I want to point out that your comment about XML is actually valid to a degree. I've found that using XML for prompts lets you annotate specific keywords/phrases and import structure on the prompt which can produce better results.

Getting results back in XML though? That's a terrible idea, you're asking for parsing errors. YML is the best format for getting structured data from LLMs because if there's a parse error you typically only lose the malformed bits.

XML and other document markup languages are objectively horrible data storage formats. Why is "forgiving" a desired quality in this case?

It’s much more than just generating structured schema. It also understands user intent and assigns the correct functions to solve a query. So for example if we give it two functions getWeather(city) and getTime(city) and ask “what’s the weather in New York?” It will decide on the correct function to use. It will also know to use both functions if we ask it “what’s the time and weather in New York?”.

I do wonder if a stack-based format would be easier for an LLM. Seems like a better fit for the attention mechanism. My suspicion (without having lifted a finger to check) is that it's the closing tags that make the difference for XML. Go stack-based and you can drop the opening tags, and save the tokens.

Yes, the 'function calling' naming is unfortunate. It's really structured output that can be fed as input into any functionality elsewhere in your code.

The difference between the structured output of json mode is that the model can choose which set of structured output (matched to various function definitions). Subtle, but pretty cool and powerful.

I’ve used Claude and I’m not impressed. Opus or the other one.

Damn, now I have to redo my code to use Claude :D Been waiting for this for a long time. Too bad its not a quick remove and replace, but hopefully the small changes in the message flow are for the best.

Is there a reason you wouldn't have abstracted your llm calling?

Wake me up when I can actually sign up to use it. Anthropic demand a phone number, and won't accept mine, presumably because it's from Google Voice. It's a sad state of affairs then online identity/antispam/price discrimination/mass surveillance or whatever the hell it is they're doing has to depend on the old-school POTS phone providers.

Probably US only, and you are not in the US? Otherwise use your real phone.

Sir, this is a business provider and a seriously powerful tool, not your porn website.

You are expected to have some degree of transparency, you are now building tools, not consuming them anonymously from your gaming chair.

Yeah, porn websites work better...

Why would you be expected to use a real phone number to build tools? There’s no reason to make development of tools less private than it could otherwise be, especially when all the privacy loss is on one side of the exchange. You need to provide a legitimate justification or the assumption that it’s for some weird data harvesty thing holds.

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