What Is Auto-GPT? Step-by-Step Guide for Beginners

The development of AI is moving at such a breakneck pace that even the most brilliant minds are having trouble keeping up. Now and then a brand new AI tool will appear. Some of these resources are only passing fads, while others can help in the long run.

The ChatGPT-based AI phenomenon known as Auto-GPT has the potential to become a useful AI tool. Auto-GPT, you ask? To what extent is it similar to ChatGPT, and what additional features does it offer?

What Is Auto-GPT?

Based on ChatGPT’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), Auto-GPT is an open-source artificial intelligence project. At its core, Auto-GPT provides GPT with the ability to work independently, without the intervention of a human agent. Neither is this a groundbreaking technological advance nor an innovative linguistic framework. And it’s not another AI chatbot; last year was more than enough of those.

Yes, GPT can now take care of itself with the help of Auto-GPT. Why is that so awesome? When compared to ChatGPT, what sets apart Auto-GPT?

How Does Auto-GPT Work?

Auto-GPT is functionally equivalent to ChatGPT, but with the extra capability of AI agents. AI agents can be thought of as virtual helpers. An AI agent, like a personal assistant, can be trained to carry out certain duties or make decisions in accordance with a predetermined set of rules and an objective.

An AI agent can function on your behalf like a personal assistant, taking care of things like organizing appointments, sending emails, making purchases, running analyses, and making choices. Like a human assistant, an AI agent has only the capabilities you grant it through an application programming interface (API), so there’s no need to be too excited or alarmed about the prospect just yet.

Its internet-based research capabilities are limited to what you make available to it. However, if you grant it access to your computer’s terminal, it could be able to do things like search the internet for apps and install them if it determines that doing so will help it achieve its aim. Do not, under any circumstances, give it access to your credit card information.

Auto-GPT, then, is just GPT with a companion robot that directs GPT. The companion robot takes your instructions and uses GPT and several application programming interfaces (APIs) to complete the tasks you specify.

Difference between Auto-GPT and Chat-GPT

Autonomy is one of the main distinguishing features of ChatGPT and Auto-GPT, however there are many others. Auto-GPT simulates human decision-making by replacing “human agents” with “AI agents” for most of its tasks. Let us paint a more precise image for you.

Consider using ChatGPT to organize your child’s birthday party. How do you spend your time? In such case, you might simply visit ChatGPT and ask, “Help me plan a birthday party for my 8-year-old daughter.” ChatGPT generates a list of considerations in a flash.

The typical suspects (the birthday theme, venue, gifts, food and beverages, decorations, guest lists, etc.) were all covered by the checklist provided by ChatGPT. The reality is, birthday preparation is difficult and fraught with its own unique set of challenges. As a result, we tackled two related issues at once: inviting people and buying presents. Again, we turned to ChatGPT for guidance, this time on how to organize the guest list and invites, as well as what presents to give and where to buy them.

It takes time because we have to be guided through the entire subset of birthday planning steps.

The human prompters, or “we,” are the human agents in this situation. With auto-GPT, we may soon be able to rely on robot helpers instead of humans. Auto-GPT, which employs AI agents, may therefore self-prompt and tackle every subset of the birthday planning problem when you ask GPT to do so.

In this case, for instance, Auto-GPT might initially present the general picture like ChatGPT, but then it would push itself to deal with arranging guest lists and invitations, and if necessary, send out those invitations to the guest on the list. No, there’s more. Theoretically, it could also use the guest list to generate a shopping list of possible presents and place an order for them at your home address and credit card billing information. Auto-GPT might potentially come up with a birthday theme and perhaps employ an event planning company to carry it out.

It’s a stretch, to be sure, but Auto-GPT is already being used in the real world in very similar situations.

Auto-GPT was assigned the task of producing a podcast. How did Auto-GPT help? To create the podcast, it sifted through data from multiple online sources.

Use case for GPT agent: read about recent events and prepare podcast outline.

All-In podcast example. With 5 searches (and 15 web browses,) Auto GPT research agent prepares a 5 topic podcast on recent news with accurate references (and a cold open.) pic.twitter.com/OAVE6VNd60

— JB (@jamesbbaker4) April 11, 2023

Not convinced? Someone, though, also utilized it to create a robot stock analyst.

Meet Isabella, my personal Investment Analyst designed to autonomously gather and analyse market data for me and saving the results into my system files for me. Using Lang-chain's framework she can now outsource her tasks to other ai agents. #OpenAI #AutoGPT pic.twitter.com/6Vgw668z9A

— MOE (@mohamed43840) April 6, 2023

Not convinced yet? The terrifying offspring of Auto-GPT, Chaos-GPT, tweets out a supervillain manifesto. Chaos-GPT is an Auto-GPT project with the stated goal of wiping off humanity. The things Chaos-GPT wants to do are scary and plausible, but they’re actually quite funny since it can’t achieve them. But let’s hope it doesn’t gain such privileges, lest we chuckle ourselves to oblivion.

Does Auto-GPT Have a Good Future?

Auto-GPT is currently in the testing phase. If you don’t know how to code, you probably won’t be able to use this tool in any meaningful way right now.

However, its limited use shows us its potential. It shows how far OpenAI’s GPT and AI have still to come in their development. To sum up, Auto-GPT is fascinating, thrilling, and little terrifying.

There are two main issues that prevent Auto-GPT from reaching its full potential.

The first is that Auto-GPT is not yet complete; more functionality and fine-tuning are needed before it can perform as expected. Second, Auto-GPT isn’t supported by GPT-3.5 as it was never intended to do so. AutoGPT is currently being adapted for GPT-4, as can be seen on the official GitHub.

Time is of the essence for AutoGPT to reach completion so that GPT-4 can be issued. Once that occurs, AutoGPT will likely live up to the hype and become as powerful as expected. Its planned improvements and GPT-4 are still a ways off, but in the meantime you could find it entertaining to play with.