Chapter 1. About tool calling

Tool calling extends model functionality beyond text generation, allowing it to perform actions such as querying databases, calling APIs, executing calculations, or retrieving real-time information.

Red Hat AI Inference Server provides comprehensive support for tool calling through the upstream vLLM project. With tool calling, the language model can understand when it needs to call an external tool and select the appropriate tool based on the context. The model generates properly formatted tool call requests and integrates the tool response back into the conversation flow.

Tool calling provides several advantages for building intelligent applications with Red Hat AI Inference Server: