LLM Tools & MCP - What are they and how to get started?
LLMs, as powerful as they are, have a few disadvantages common to all of them: 1. Their knowledge and information are limited by their training data and, hence, are unaware of any new developments post a specific date. 2. They, by themselves, are unable to take any action based on the reasoning they have developed. Tools This is where the concept of tools comes in to address both of these issues. Tools are callable interfaces that can be bound to an LLM. These can be functions, APIs, scripts, system calls, or anything callable, whose interface we expose to the LLM. Let’s consider a function for simplicity. When a tool gets bound to an LLM, we pass the function's name, its description, and the input parameters it takes, along with their data type and description, etc., to the LLM. From this data, especially the description, the LLM is now given context about the existence of a function that can be called to retrieve certain information or take some action. Bas...
