Lecture 11 is a tool-use/function calling/agentic 101! I almost skipped this one, as this chapter started as the only skill-specific topic in the book, but since writing it tool-use has only become more foundational to modern models.
This is a tour from the basics -- why LLMs need tools -- to some of the cutting edge challenges scaling agentic RL. Of course, there's plenty of history and fundamentals along the way.
Personally, I'm excited to get much more deeply into this area as a researcher again soon. Just a few more lectures left, but I'll likely keep making a few more videos now that I have pipelines that are lightweight and fun.
00:00 Introduction & Motivations 07:29 Part 1: Why Language Models Need Tools (+ related work) 15:30 Part 2: Infra - How Tool Calls Actually Work 24:17 Part 3: Training for Tool Use & OpenThoughts-Agent 36:38 Takeaways
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