Auto-GPT, an open source app that uses OpenAI’s text-generating models, is currently generating a great deal of social media attention. The program can act somewhat autonomously in that it creates its own feedback loop, asking itself a series of questions to help build a more nuanced and complete response to a text prompt. In short, something that would take a user multiple prompts to produce the desired information using ChatGPT could be accomplished using a single request of Auto-GPT, which could independently explore a subject before spitting back a comprehensive response.

Game developer Toran Bruce Richards used OpenAI’s API to create Auto-GPT, available on GitHub. an experimental open-source application showcasing the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model. Based in Scotland, Richards is a Unity developer who since 2018 has been running his own studio, Significant Gravitas with a goal of “harnessing game technology for the good of the Earth and humanity.”

As per a recent tweet, he believes “Auto-GPT has the potential to save humanity from mass job loss caused by automation from closed-source AI. If everyone has access to their own team of autonomous agents, everyone is enabled and complete.”

An early example of the possibilities of driving GPT-4 to run autonomously, Auto-GPT “chains together LLM ‘thoughts’ to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set,” Richards says on GitHub.

“What makes Auto-GPT reasonably capable is its ability to interact with apps, software and services both online and local, like web browsers and word processors,” writes TechCrunch, using the example “a prompt like ‘help me grow my flower business,’” for which “Auto-GPT can develop a somewhat plausible advertising strategy and build a basic website.”

Auto-GPT can even harness speech synthesizers, such as offered by ElevenLabs, to make phone calls, TechCrunch says.

There are some hurdles to using Auto-GPT. It is designed to run in a development environment (Docker seems to be the preferred choice) and requires an OpenAI API key, offered by subscription. But already, “new apps have emerged to make Auto-GPT even easier to use, like AgentGPT and GodMode, which provide a simple interface where users can input what they want to accomplish directly on a browser page,” TechCrunch explains.

Like all the popular large language models, Auto-GPT can occasionally veer toward bathos.

“One Reddit user claims that, given a budget of $100 to spend within a server instance, Auto-GPT made a wiki page on cats, exploited a flaw in the instance to gain admin-level access and took over the Python environment in which it was running — and then ‘killed’ itself,” TechCrunch writes.

Related:
Auto-GPT Is a New AI That Does the Work for You – Here’s How It Works, Tom’s Guide, 4/18/23
How to Create Your Own Auto-GPT AI Agent, Tom’s Hardware, 4/15/23
Auto-GPT: 5 Amazing Things People Have Already Done with It, Digital Trends, 4/18/23