A Friendly Intro to AI Agents
Quickstart and Concepts of Auto-GPT & AgentGPT
What are AI Agents?
- Agent AIs (or autonomous AI) involve chaining inputs and outputs between AI systems so that they interact without human intervention
- Agents are typically role and goal-oriented. They achieve tasks through feedback loops similar to human teams
- Agents are built atop existing AI models. GPT-4 is the latest-and-greatest, but is only available as early access. GPT 3.5 is the more ubiquitous model, which also underlies ChatGPT
- Examples of open-source Agent AI tools Auto-GPT, AgentGPT, BabyAGI, and GodMode
Cool Things Built with AI Agent
- WritingGPT — a fully automated writing team. The author sets up AI agents with roles writer, copywriter, SEO-optimizer etc.. and then lets the system crank out interesting articles that pass plagarism detection (uses GPT4) and end us as ranked search results!
2. Research simulating human behavior (read the paper or see it in action). Agents are given human objectives like “plan a birthday party” and word of it spreads around town — truly emergent social behavior!
3. Python Agents that build tic-tac-toe and other games from scratch. Amazingly, even a vague prompt like “make an interesting new game” results in a fully playable creation!
I want to try it out now
You can try out AgentGPT in your browser immediately and for free: https://agentgpt.reworkd.ai/
Agents are created, they autonomously set up a task list, and then act upon it to produce content. In this case, it came up with the task construct a persuasive argument using the generated data and present it in a clear and concise manner and went on to make arguments like
“In addition, dogs are known to boost our physical and mental health. Research has shown that owning a dog can reduce stress, anxiety…”
I Want to Go Deeper
- AgentGPT and Auto-GPT are open-source Python projects that can be run on your device
- You will need an OpenAI API key
- Auto-GPT is made for GPT4, but that’s still in early access. Both can be run with GPT3.5 (model underlying ChatGPT)
- For a quick Auto-GPT install guide, see this post from the PyCoach.
Gotchas
- Agents based on GPTs can amplify faults with GPT, for example, are prone to hallucinations.
- AgentAIs make rapid API requests, so you may need to purchase OpenAI’s pro plan and I suggest setting usage limits.
Suggested Reading
Got something that should be captured? Please leave a comment and I’ll put it in the guide.
