Unified tool use API across Mistral, Cohere, NousResearch, and Llama models

AI Impact Summary

The release introduces a unified tool use API across Mistral, Cohere, NousResearch, and Llama models, with Transformers providing helper functions and extended chat templating to simplify tool integration. Tools can be defined as JSON schemas or auto-converted from Python functions, enabling model-agnostic tool calls via chat templates and reducing cross-provider integration friction. Teams should plan migration to the unified schema and templates to align existing tool definitions, but the change enables broader, tool-enabled capabilities across multi-model deployments.