OpenAI launched a feature called “function calling” last year, but it’s a feature I haven’t used and didn’t understand until today.
Part of my misunderstanding was because the feature is poorly named. It made me (and many other more technical people) expect that the capability means an LLM can call functions. That isn’t the case. OpenAI’s “function calling” allows developers to ensure a model’s outputs fit a particular format. Instead of generating just regular text, the model can strictly adhere to JSON format, for example. The YouTuber below provides the clarity I needed on this today. He also shows how to achieve the same JSON format effect using a local on-device model with Ollama.
https://youtu.be/RXDWkiuXtG0?feature=shared