The capabilities of AI tools are progressing rapidly, with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and many others racing to stay ahead of the competition. It feels like advances and apps are arriving on a weekly basis, with the bar constantly being raised in terms of what AI can do for us.
Auto-GPT is the latest evidence for this: It leverages the power of ChatGPT to create an autonomous AI assistant, capable of taking on tasks and projects on its own and working through multiple steps in a job without you having to prompt it every time. In other words, it does a lot of the hard work for you, without you having to come up with your own follow-up responses or ideas.
Think about everything you can do with ChatGPT, then imagine rolling that into a system that can supply its own feedback and make its own choices. Take coding for example: ChatGPT can output blocks of code based on your specifications, but Auto-GPT can manage an entire software project for you.
We asked Auto-GPT to research the differences between iOS and Android, and it split the research into sub-tasks: looking at the user interfaces, the available apps, the security and privacy features, and so on. These sub-tasks were run and analyzed separately, and the agent decided to save its findings to a text file in each category so they'd be easier to refer to later.
Another way to use Auto-GPT is to specify a particular role for it, whether that's as a website builder or a podcast researcher. It will then act accordingly and keep you up to date on its progress. There is something of a learning curve with the software, but it pays to experiment with what it's capable of.
Auto-GPT is able to access current information from the web, and it can remember its previous actions. The code for the tool has been released for free, though you need to pay for access to the OpenAI API. If you want to get at the latest ChatGPT-4 version of the large language model then you also need to have a paid OpenAI account (otherwise you'll be on ChatGPT-3.5).