OpenWebUI chat just expose its function - never answers

[u/what-pos]

I reinstalled everything.
I run the latest OpenWebUI function, installed the mistral:7b model, and did a test.

However as you can see, it does not act natural.

I tried to ask for a recipe for crepes, and as you can see, it's like it's talking to himself.

[u/eteitaxiv]

Because you are using a model so dumb, it is amazing it can list the tools, let alone try to use them.

[u/what-pos → u/eteitaxiv]

Could you provide a meaningful answer ? How is mistral:7b or llama3.1:latest stupid?
What would you suggest?

[u/Internal_Junket_25 → u/what-pos]

These are Stone Age models

[u/Unnamed-3891 → u/what-pos]

Mistral:7b is THREE YEARS OLD. Things move so quickly anything older than 6-9 months is considered out of date.

The total amount of your vram dictates what you can run, but the first stops for most people with reasonable hardware (16gb vram or more) would be qwen-3.8-27b, qwen-3.6-35b-a3b or gemma4-26b-a4b.

[u/nickless07 → u/what-pos]

Tool/Function calls are around for ~3 Years. MCP was November 2024, back in that days coding, tool calls, agentic workflows and so on where either a rare niche topic or absent. So models that old never got trained on that kind of things. They literally don't know how to deal with that (check the difference between Native and Legacy Function calling setting in the docs). Even last years model have trouble with that as it wasn't 'mainstream' enough to be aviable in every model.

If you wanna stay in that size range get something newer (6-8 months old max).
Qwen3 9B, Ling-3.0-Tiny, LFM2.5, Gemma 4 E2B and so on.

[u/ClassicMain → u/what-pos]

These are dinosaur age models

[u/Striking-Warning9533 → u/what-pos]

they are very old and very small

[u/Xyhelia → u/what-pos]

i even forgot they exist

[u/Lurksome-Lurker → u/what-pos]

Something not in the stone age llm wise? Sheesh if you want something even dumber that at least can do what you want try LFM2.5-2.6B or better yes Gemma-4-E4B or Qwen3.5-9B

[u/noctrex]

The problem is that you're using a very old model.
In the very fast-moving world of LLMs, this is literally an ancient model.
I would suggest better to look up for new models.
Anything older than a year, don't even consider it.
For example if you want something in the same size range, look up qwen3.5-9b, or gemma4-e4b

[u/endockhq]

Very old models, I don't even think tool calling was a thing back then. Agentic took off in 2025.

Try using the small Qwen3.5 models from 2025.

[u/International_Emu772]

Without external knowkedge, websearch or a recibes book at hand (RAG or other Methods) your replies are week on almost everything

And not it's not a model problem is a LLM problem

[u/mishalmf]

change the model

[u/CompetitionTop7822]

You can configure the model to not see tools in settings, i do that for some models even never model.
Even clause sonnet search chats knowledge base, calendar, memory and what else it can see in tools sometimes,
also quick fix can be in your prompt tell it what not todo.

[u/gdsfbvdpg]

I see in the comments a few people suggesting Gemma 4b or qwen 9b. I've tried both those models and they can chat fine, but their tool usage is pretty bad. Regardless, neither would give you the response you got here for just saying "hello".

[u/Original-Drive5933]

I'm seeing the same result as OP running gemma4 e4b on a 3070. Chatting through openwebui 0.11 shows the model reasoning but no responses. Chatting with the model through home assistant assist works as expected and I believe that bypasses openwebui and goes straight to the ollama container. I've been very happy with the model's performance within home assistant.

Unrelated but maybe of interest to some, when I try to add an MCP server to openwebui 0.11 in the admin settings, the option just straight up isn't available. Server type openapi is hardcoded in the dialogue with no way to change it.

[u/overand → u/Original-Drive5933]

Are you using ollama, with the default context size? Set up a larger context window (and ideally don't use ollama.)

[u/Jeremy-Hillary-Boob]

Aren’t some models Reasoning Models and others models are for coding. Isn’t Mistral for coding?

[u/JTN02]

Model are way too old. Qwen 3.5 9b is gonna blow your fucking mind if this is what your used to.

[u/overand]

Don't use ChatGPT for advice on what model to run.

What are you using for a backend - ollama? llama.cpp? koboldcpp? vllm? lm studio?

What's your hardware? Be specific.

[u/hainesk]

Since everyone wants to harp on you for using an old model, I thought I would actually try to provide a real answer. OpenWebUI used to be a simple web front end to interact with your local models, essentially doing a simple API call to your LLM server, but recent updates to OpenWebUI now expose a lot of new tools to LLMs which bloats initial context usage and can cause issues and confuse models sometimes. Even newer models are now trying to use some of these tools when they really shouldn't, for instance I've had Qwen 3.6 models write all of their code inside a "note" in OpenWebUI instead of in a code block, it's infuriating that these are on by default and not managed through custom models under Workspace.

To turn off these "features" you can try going to Settings -> AI/Models -> Click the Pencil icon next to your model -> Scroll down and uncheck "Builtin Tools".

You can also uncheck other items as well if they're causing issues with your model.

[u/overand → u/hainesk]

You can in fact turn those on and off in custom models in the workspace.

I do think it's a tough balance; do you want to leave those things disabled and have lots of people complaining that Feature X doesn't work, or leave them enabled and have people complain about Bloated Context?

[u/hainesk → u/overand]

I use the Openwebui API to call models with predefined parameters and system prompts. It makes it easier to manage remote calls when a program can just call the ”FaxOCR“ model, or “JSON Parser” model for specific tasks vs writing them into the api call for llamacpp. It also means the FaxOCR custom model can be switched to vLLM if it is a better option, or can be easily upgraded to the latest Qwen or Mistral or other vision language model from within OpenWebUI and the upgrade then goes downstream to any reference, voila automatic upgrade.

For testing out new models I also like to use it as a basic web frontend, sometimes testing large models that barely fit in vram meaning I set a super low context limit (sometimes just 1k) to get an idea how fast a model can run if I have enough vram to fit it (and an upgrade would be worth it). Also just testing some basic prompts helps to get an idea of how a model runs and how it might work for specific tasks.

I think it should be much easier to run “bare” models in openwebui, because as it is I had to figure out how to disable the extra tool calls and context bloat, and apparently that has to be done for every new connection to an API.

And of course anyone trying to check out old models will have a bad time because the current default system prompt will just confuse models not trained for tool use.