For the same reason you don't run "4+6" on a calculator.
External tool call has an overhead. It requires a round trip into an external tool. It requires an LLM to run in agentic autoregression - it can't be used in prefill.
Which means that having native arithmetic capabilities is useful. Forward pass arithmetics are an LLM version of quick mental math.
An LLM can read "#define SILLY_TIME_CONST (3*20*60*60*1000)" and have "SILLY_TIME_CONST is 60 h expressed as 216000000 ms" already cached by the end of the line, before it even emits its first token.
Comments
For the same reason you don't run "4+6" on a calculator.
External tool call has an overhead. It requires a round trip into an external tool. It requires an LLM to run in agentic autoregression - it can't be used in prefill.
Which means that having native arithmetic capabilities is useful. Forward pass arithmetics are an LLM version of quick mental math.
An LLM can read "#define SILLY_TIME_CONST (3*20*60*60*1000)" and have "SILLY_TIME_CONST is 60 h expressed as 216000000 ms" already cached by the end of the line, before it even emits its first token.