Different tools will be used for “2024 election results” and “cosine(333 radians)” prompts, so yes.
The AI can iterate. You give a complete chat history of what it’s been doing so it can learn the function returns and know when its done.
Give it a google_search and a bing_search, and the AI will probably have a preference which to call first, and might try both if unsatisfied, or try different queries.
Assistants use the same function-capable AI models as you’d use directly with chatCompletions.
Some of the functions provided to assistants are OpenAI’s specifications and not yours, though. If they have an inefficient function, like “browse document chunk” and the AI has to start at page 1 and keep scrolling for the answer with successive calls, that’s another case where you’d be better off doing your own programming and knowing what’s going on.