Meta’s Toolformer AI can teach itself to use search engines, calculators, calendars

3 years ago 1

ARTICLE AD BOX

Meta Platforms has developed an AI language model that can teach itself to use external tools, including calculators, calendars, and search engines.

Dubbed Toolformer, the language model can use application programming interfaces (APIs), which researchers achieved by giving it a set of human-written examples demonstrating how each API is used.

They then allowed it to create a language modelling dataset with possible API calls.

Meta’s researchers say it did this in a “self-supervised” manner, meaning that they didn’t have to give it explicit human guidance.

Toolformer learned to predict each text-based API call as if they were any other form of text.

When in operation, the language model can insert calls when needed and decide for itself which tool to use and how to use it.

This enables it to use external tools like calculators, translators, and search engines. Some large language models are notoriously bad with arithmetic.

Toolformer can bypass such a limitation by using a calculator programme. Similarly, it can use a calendar app via an API link to add dates to a user’s calendar if the need arises.

Meta’s researchers based Toolformer on a pre-trained GPT-J model with 6.7 million parameters.

Their testing of Toolformer revealed that its tool-using abilities help it to perform better than the GPT-3 model, which has 175 billion parameters.