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Notes -
I don't think using tool calls reflects poorly on LLMs are products at all - if anything it enhances their value. This isn't an "LLMs suck" post.
However a lot of people view intelligence as a "unified" property. I've been pushing back on that idea on here for a while because I doubt that will be correct; my guess (and so far I've been proven correct; see LLMs getting worse at writing as they specialize for coding) is actually that there are benefits to intelligence specialization. This doesn't mean you cannot wrap those specialized compartments together into a unified process, of course. The human brain, for instance, is "unified" but it has specialized regions that seem to be optimized for specific tasks; same with your computer. Arguably an LLM using tool calls and the like is doing something similar.
I think it matters because 1. I'm petty and like being right, and 2. I think it's worth thinking clearly about these things.
For quite some time, frontier models have generally been Mixture of Experts models (or, possibly, something even more proprietary and advanced - I'm not an insider). I think this fits with your intuition.
Thanks for flagging that link! Yes, I do think that fits with my intuition.
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