Meet AutoGPT: The new kid on the AI block that's making the internet go crazy

How does Auto-GPT work?

Created by Toran Bruce Richards, Auto-GPT is an open-source application and more of an experiment that could even be labeled as a tool to showcase GPT-4's capabilities. What the script manages to also do is string together tasks that one needs GPT-4 to perform and perform them in the intended sequence.

To do this, a user needs to first create an AI agent on the app, give it a description of its role, and then lay out five goals that it needs to fulfill. While doing this, one also needs to provide it an OpenAI API key along with a Google API key.

Once this is done, the tool can simply run tasks in an iterative manner which would include taking a GPT-4 output and putting it back into the AI model to make improvements to the results.

In case, a user wants to check the result at each step of the way, they can also ask the tool to seek permission before proceeding to the next step. The applications of such a tool are numerous and some have taken it to the extreme and suggested that AI can be put to work and used to earn money, as well.

While that might be a bit of a stretch at the moment, it hasn't stopped people from trying to build agents with such intentions, something that has gone viral on social media.

Users may also be warned that GPT-4 and other AI models have a habit of "hallucinating" and can create some fictional data based on tasks. So, not all results can be trusted 100 percent.

Auto-GPT is just one of the many tools that now allow people to create their own AI agents. For those worried if this could lead to the rise of autonomous AI, it is unlikely given GPT-4 itself has its limitations and is a very narrow-AI, able to complete one type of task.

Researchers are now aiming for artificial general intelligence (AGI), where an AI system can solve problems that it is not specifically trained for and that is something we really need to have safeguards on from the moment go.

This report contained information that first appeared in ArsTechnica.