The next phase of artificial intelligence is here, and it is already causing havoc in the technology sector.
The release of Auto-GPT last week, an artificial intelligence program capable of operating autonomously and developing itself over time, has encouraged a proliferation of autonomous "AI agents" that some believe could revolutionize the way we operate and live.
Unlike current systems such as ChatGPT, which require manual commands for every activity, AI agents can give themselves new tasks to work on with the purpose of achieving a larger goal, and without much human interaction – an unparalleled level of autonomy for AI models such as GPT-4.
Experts say it's difficult to predict the technology's future consequences because it's still in its early stages.
According to Steve Engels, a computer science professor at the University of Toronto who works with generative AI, an AI agent is any artificial intelligence capable of performing a certain function without human intervention.
“The term has been around for decades,” he said. For example, programs that play chess or control video game characters are considered agents because “they have the agency to be able to control some of their own behaviors and explore the environment.”
This latest generation of AI agents is similarly autonomous, but with significantly higher capabilities, thanks to state-of-the-art AI systems like OpenAI's GPT-4 — a massive language model capable of tasks ranging from writing difficult code to creating sonnets to passing the bar exam.
Earlier this month, OpenAI published an API for GPT-4 and their hugely popular chatbot ChatGPT, allowing any third-party developer to integrate the company's technology into their own products. Auto-GPT is one of the most recent products to emerge from the API, and it may be the first example of GPT-4 being allowed to operate fully autonomously.
What exactly is Auto-GPT and what can it do?
Toran Bruce Richards, the founder and lead developer at video game studio Significant Gravitas Ltd, designed Auto-GPT. Its source code is freely accessible on Github, allowing anyone with programming skills to create their own AI agents.
Based on the project's Github page, Auto-GPT can browse the internet for "searches and information gathering," make visuals, maintain short-term and long-term memory, and even use text-to-speech to allow the AI to communicate.
Most notably, the program can rewrite and improve on its own code, allowing it to "recursively debug, develop, and self-improve," according to Significant Gravitas. It remains to be seen how effective these self-updates are.
“Auto-GPT is able to actually take those responses and execute them in order to make some larger task happen,” Engels said, including coming up with its own prompts in response to new information.
Auto-GPT became the #1 trending repository on Github almost immediately after its launch, earning over 61,000 stars by Friday night and spawning a slew of offshoots. Over the last week, the program has led Twitter's trending tab, with innumerable programmers and entrepreneurs offering their perspectives.
Prior to publishing, Richards and Significant Gravitas did not respond to the Star's requests for comment. Twitter has been flooded with users describing their uses for Auto-GPT, ranging from creating business blueprints to automating to-do lists.
While anyone may use Auto-GPT, it does require some programming skills to set up. Users, thankfully, have produced AgentGPT, which integrates Auto-GPT into one's web browser, allowing anyone to make their own AI Agents.
Given the program's skills and affordability, AI agents may eventually replace human positions such as customer service representatives, content writers, and even financial advisors. At the moment, the technology has flaws — for example, ChatGPT has been known to manufacture news reports or scientific studies, while Auto-GPT has struggled to stay on goal. Still, AI is evolving at a dizzying speed, and it's impossible to predict what will happen next, according to Engels.
“We don’t really know at this point what it’s going to be or even what the next iteration of it is going to look like,” he said. “Things are still very much in the development stage right now.”