Anthropic is rolling out a new feature to Claude-3, its family of artificial intelligence (AI) models. Called “Tool Use” (or Function Calling), this feature allows Claude to communicate with external tools and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to perform a wide range of tasks. This way, the AI chatbot can perform tasks that are more specific to the user, such as finding the best meeting based on the availability of participants and analyzing big financial data to provide future predictions and actionable insights.
The new Tool Use feature is an AI Agent, similar to OpenAI’s GPTs or the recently announced Gems and Copilot (via Copilot Studio) from Google and Microsoft, respectively. Essentially, these are mini-chatbots that can be created by adding an external database to make them specialists in one specific task, as opposed to generalist chatbots that can do a little bit of everything but have limited accuracy.
In the case of Anthropic, however, these AI agents work a little differently than their competitors. Instead of using natural language prompts, users must consume an API (for the data) and code its functionality in Claude. While this may not be possible for everyone, those with sufficient coding knowledge can create powerful function calling tools for a variety of purposes.
The AI company has no internet access and is trained on offline data, so users can also use Tool Use to add information about a recent sporting event or a conference in the workplace and have it analyzed. The tool is now generally available for all Claude-3 models on the Anthropic Messages API, Amazon Bedrock, and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI.
In a blog postThe AI company highlighted several business-related use cases for the tool. These range from finding specific details from a large invoice database to reducing the workload of data entry to answering customers’ technical questions instantly by accessing product details. But they can also be used for personal use.
For example, since Tool Use also accepts images as input, users can share a large album of their photos in different outfits, along with details of outfits they’re planning to buy, and ask the AI if they’d look good in them. They can also ask more complex questions, such as suggesting a 5-day office outfit. Interestingly, the company claims that Claude-3 can handle hundreds of simple tools and a smaller number of complex tools simultaneously.
With this release, most major AI companies have offered AI agents with their chatbots. If you want to experience these agents for free, the GPT Store is a good place to start, as OpenAI has made them available for free worldwide.
