Exploring Next
Exploring Next — Ep 419 w/ Justy & Cody — 5 Small Language Models for Agentic Tool Calling - KDnuggets
Small language models are gaining ground on a critical frontier benchmark: tool calling. This episode looks at five compact, open-weight models that can route to APIs, format JSON arguments, and run multi-step agentic workflows without requiring a data center. Cody and Justy debate whether the gap between small and frontier models is closing fast enough to matter for real shipping teams.