How Kimi 2 Became One of the Best Tool-Using Models
Continuing our walk through Moonshot AI’s technical paper for Kimi 2, let’s move on from how Moonshine rephrased data during pre-training and look at how they taught Kimi how to use tools better in agentic workflows.
I like MCP, but I don’t like that it made everyone think tool use is plug-and-play. Yes, MCP standardizes how we express and add tool functions to our contexts (and remember, it’s one of many), but we still have to provide our model with instructions for when and how to use the tools available to it.
Connecting your model to random MCPs and then giving it a task is like giving someone a drill and teaching them how it works, then asking them to fix your sink. Is the drill relevant in this scenario? If it’s not, why was it given to me? It’s a classic case of context confusion.
The dominant, general pattern for instructing a model with tools is called ReAct, which stands for “reason” and “action.” ReAct isn’t fancy; it’s just a prompting technique. We provide a model with tools, then instruct it to reason about whether it should use these tools to accomplish a given task.
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