Toolformer is a language model trained to decide autonomously when to use external tools (like calculators, calendars, or search engines) and how to use them. It learns to insert API calls into its own text generation to solve problems that pure language models struggle with, such as arithmetic or fact-checking.
Introduced by Meta AI in the 2023 paper 'Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools'.
Paved the way for 'Agentic' workflows and function calling features in modern models like GPT-4 and Claude.