AutoGPT: How to Use Autonomous AI Agent To Your Own Advantage
ChatGPT is old-school. Auto-GPT and AI agents are the hottest topics right now.
The new autonomous AI can understand abstract goals, break them up into actionable steps, and execute the plan all by itself.
The Github repo with the Auto-GPT app code has been trending for more than a week now, making waves in the industry. The pace of development is crazy, and it seems like a couple of new groundbreaking updates come out every day.
Let’s take a look at Auto-GPT and see what all the hype is about!
🤖 What is Auto-GPT
Auto-GPT is an experimental open-source application that uses GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 autonomously to chain together the “thoughts” of large language models to achieve a given goal, whatever it is.
In other words, AutoGPT is an AI agent with reasoning capabilities that can analyze a given task, come up with a plan and execute it within the available possibilities.
You can ask it for whatever goal you want to achieve, and Auto-GPT will figure out what are the necessary steps that it needs to perform to achieve the given objective, criticize and correct itself, and execute the plan step by step.
One of the most fascinating abilities Auto GPT has that ChatGPT doesn’t is its ability to create additional GPT-4 (or GPT-3.5) instances, prompt them with specific tasks, and go back and forth with them, refining their work until the job gets done.
🔑 Key Features of Auto-GPT
Auto-GPT has several unique features that make it a prototype of the next frontier of AI development:
- Assigning goals to be worked on autonomously until completed.
- Creating new AI agents (GPT-4/GPT-3.5 instances) and chain them together to work on the objective.
- Internet access and ability to read/write files.
- Long-term and short-term memory to know what has been done.
- Write and execute code.
What does it all mean?
First, Auto-GPT accepts all sorts of tasks as objectives. You can ask it to write an app, collect ingredients for a recipe, figure out how to become rich, learn to trade crypto, or whatever goal you want to achieve with its help.
Auto-GPT will do the research for you, collect the sources, analyze them, and use them for the final solution, be it an answer, an app, or an abstract action.
Second, Auto-GPT can create new GPT-4 instances and work with them. The app identifies when its context gets too big to operate further and distills the overwhelming part into a prompt for the new separate instance of AI agent. It then interacts with the new agent.
Sort of like agent Smith from the Matrix movie 😀
Auto-GPT can also access the Internet. It can google things for research, visit websites, collect information from there, and process it further.
And very recently, it became possible for AutoGPT to run code also:
💼 Potential use cases for Auto-GPT and AI agents
AI replacing human jobs has been a hot topic just recently, and it looks like the issue is getting more serious. Auto-GPT systems can potentially replace workers in many industries.
Here are several examples of how Auto-GPT and AI agents can be used for business:
Will Customer Service Be Replaced by AI
Everything customer service does can potentially be done by an Auto-GPT AI agent: picking customer inquiries, providing support, and maybe even suggesting upsells.
But here’s the thing:
Unlike humans, AI agents are available 24/7 and can speak almost every language,
They also solve some of the biggest pains of the customer service industry: long hold times, inexperienced representatives, and communication issues. With AutoGPT’s AI magic touch, customer service is set to become a piece of cake.
Now, here’s some food for thought: with around 2.8 million customer service jobs in the US alone, what happens when AI swoops in to fill those positions?
Social Media Managers are at risk
Auto-GPT AI agent is a perfect candidate for a social media accounts manager for businesses. It can generate content (images too), schedule posts, and sometimes respond to followers.
Now, of course, when the reputation is at stake, you want a human supervisor to control everything. But it’s a magic wand for small businesses that don’t have the time and resources for social media. When they train Auto-GPT to generate memes, you’ll know it’s over for humans.
Will Financial Managers Be Replaced by AI
Maybe LLMs aren’t the best candidates for math tasks, but potentially, given the right tools and the data, Auto-GPT can be used to automate financial data analysis and provide the best recommendations.
Even if Auto-GPT captures 1% of the total wealth management market, that’s about $1 trillion.
Will Coding Be Replaced by AI Agents
Coding is probably the most obvious use case for Auto-GPT along with writing. Given the ability of LLMs to generate code, Auto-GPT can become a major contender for software development tasks.
And even if it won’t necessarily replace programmers, because programming is more than just coding, AI agents like Auto-GPT can capture a decent chunk of the software market by providing automated services to the end users within itself.
Auto GPT for Trading and Crypto
Ever since ChatGPT went mainstream, crypto bros have been hyping up the “AI + Crypto money making” narrative selling courses, signals, etc.
And while ChatGPT is a no go for making financial decisions, AI agents backed by data and the right tools can become powerful instruments for traders.
Auto-GPT for Market Research
Auto-GPT can save hours of researching if you know how to use it. This new tech has been live for a few weeks only and has already shown promising results.
Auto-GPT for Podcast Research
AI agents can go super niche. Auto-GPT can save hours of valuable time by automating the research process for your podcast show. And unlike ChatGPT, it can now provide accurate references and summarize important information.
🛠️ Auto GPT Examples: What can you do with it
The technology is very young, but it’s accessible and open-source. And developers are so excited about it that they keep releasing new apps almost every day. Let’s take a look at the most popular variations of the Auto-GPT AI agent.
AgentGPT
AgentGPT is an open-source project that allows you to configure and deploy autonomous AI agents in your browser.
In my opinion this is the best introduction to AutoGPT and autonomous AI agents for people who are new to this or just want to quickly figure out what is what.
All you need to do is provide the agent a goal and it will prompt itself to figure out how to achieve the goal. You only watch how it develops the plan, executes it, refines the steps, and eats your OpenAI credits 😂
You can try AgentGPT at agentgpt.reworkd.ai
BabyAGI
BabyAGI is a variation of an AutoGPT autonomous AI agent that runs on Python and can access other LLMs like Llama.
The idea behind BabyAGi is pretty much the same as AutoGPT: it iteratively creates tasks based on the result of previous tasks to achieve a given objective.
One of the obvious downsides is that by default, at the moment of writing, BabyAGI doesn’t have access to the Internet and other external resources. But combined with tools, it can be able to look up info and take actions.
We’re going to cover this app in more detail later, including some really interesting forks. Subscribe to our newsletter to not miss the important stuff.
ChaosGPT
ChaosGPT is a version of AutoGPT prompted to destroy humanity, establish global dominance, cause chaos and destruction, and control humanity through manipulation.
It is a fun experiment held to see how an autonomous AI agent would approach such an objective.
It went semi-viral on social media and some users are now worried for the humanity because its first step was the search for the most destructive weapon.
Fortunately, this isn’t some Skynet, and there’s nothing to worry about. At least for now. The limitations that we’ll discuss further don’t allow the bot to cause any serious damage to anyone. Or if nothing else works, we can simply unplug it from the network.
This experiment does, however, raise some interesting and serious topics for AI ethics researchers to discuss further.
TeenageAGI
Teenage AGI is an autonomous AI agent inspired by BabyAGi that can recall infinite memory, thinks before it speaks, and doesn’t lose memory after being shut down. It can also read large texts like research papers and store them in memory.
You can even put thoughts into its long-term memory:
⚠️ Known limitations of Auto-GPT
As much as autonomous AI agents are kind of a breakthrough in developing AGI-like systems, they aren’t there yet. Not even close.
There are limitations and problems that engineers and researchers need to solve.
The technology is a couple of weeks old, but users have already started sharing their experience with the app. And while AutoGPT is impressive, it has its flaws. Some of them are:
- The cost of running an autonomous AI agent like AutoGPT may get really high.
- AutoGPT, BabyAGI, and other AI agents are just experiments at this point, and they aren’t ready for real-world business tasks. The potential is immense, though.
- AutoGPT sometimes runs into blocks it can’t get around.
- AI agents can have trouble understanding the contexts.
- AutoGPT can get distracted by itself. It often goes down unnecessary rabbit holes instead of concentrating on the main objective.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
A Reddit user daamsie tried the AgentGPT version and asked to develop an app according to his specs. Here’s how it went in his own words:
It kept creating new tasks on its own and eventually had to abort because the demo couldn’t run too long. It said it did all these things, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to see what it’s actually done
Redditor with the nickname daamsie on AgentGPT
The reason is that AgentGPT doesn’t have access to a proper toolset to accomplish the tasks it set for itself. Basically, it’s a virtual simulation of an actual autonomous AI agent.
Another redditor with the nickname Trek7553 shared his experience with both AutoGPT and BabyAGI. He (or she?) says that AutoGPT tends to overthink its tasks. It keeps googling solutions for every tiny task to make sure it gets everything right, even when it definitely could just figure it out on its own.
For example, it could start googling a tutorial for a simple Python script that would add two numbers together. Obviously, a “normal” ChatGPT run by GPT-4 can easily do that without any problems.
One of the serious issues right now is the cost of running such an agent. For best performance, it is recommended to use GPT-4, which is quite costly by itself. And since AutoGPT can sometimes get stuck in the loops, you should either be prepared to pay for the overused tokens or supervise its work and stop whenever it goes the wrong way.
Professor Ethan Mollick shared his experience with AutoGPT:
What he’s found is that AutoGPT can get distracted by minor tasks rather than concentrating on the main goal and leaves some of the projects unfinished. It sometimes gets confused and The commenters in the replies noted that its behavior is very much like humans.
In his other tweet, Prof. Mollick concludes that autonomous AI agents like AutoGPT are a long way from doing sophisticated autonomous tasks without human help.
⚙️ How to install and use Auto GPT
We’ve written a complete step-by-step guide on installing and using AutoGPT. Follow it and try by yourself the closest thing we have to AGI right now.
Just make sure you have Python 3.8+ and Git installed and you have an OpenAI account with an active API key. If you don’t know how or where to get it, check out our guide on the OpenAI API key.
