Skip to content
AI News HubLIVE
More
Summary only

5 Small Language Models for Agentic Tool Calling

This article presents five small language models that support structured tool calling: SmolLM3-3B, Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507, Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct, Gemma-4-E2B-it, and Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3. These compact, open-weight models enable agentic workflows without requiring large infrastructure.

SourceKDnuggetsAuthor: Matthew Mayo
5 Small Language Models for Agentic Tool Calling
Report an error

The correction channel is not available yet. You can copy the article reference below for later.

Correction instructions

Summary only

Under the source content permission, this page provides an editorial summary, key points, and a link to the original article.

Key points and analysis

Article intelligence

EngineersIntermediate

Key points

  • SmolLM3-3B offers dual tool-calling interfaces (JSON/XML and Python) and up to 128K context. Released July 2025 by Hugging Face.
  • Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 (August 2025) supports native function calling via Qwen-Agent framework, with 262K context length.
  • Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct (April 2024) is a compact 3.8B model rivaling GPT-3.5, with MIT license and chat template-based tool calling.
  • Gemma-4-E2B-it (April 2026) features multimodal input and runs in under 1.5GB memory, with Apache 2.0 license.

Highlights and analysis are generated automatically and may contain errors. Check the original source.

More recent stories on this topic · Models