There’s a new kind of program going around called AutoGPT, with a smaller sibling called BabyAGI. It’s coming — and it’s damned scary and exciting.
Basically, you can set up GPT to continuously pursue tasks until it reaches a goal you define. Tell it to build a travel following on Twitter, and it will go and do that. It already has access to the web, and it uses Pinecone to manage its long- and short-term memory. There’s a step-by-step video on getting it running locally for anyone who wants to watch it work.
What’s different from ChatGPT is who types the next prompt. Nobody does. AutoGPT breaks the main goal into smaller sub-tasks and uses tools like web browsing and file management to complete them, then feeds each result into the next step. BabyAGI is the same idea in miniature. Its author, Yohei Nakajima, described it two weeks ago as a system “capable of completing tasks, generating new tasks based on completed results, and prioritizing tasks in real-time,” with Pinecone holding the task descriptions, constraints and results between steps. Pinecone itself is a vector database, a store built for similarity search and long-term memory in AI applications, which is how the loop remembers what it has already done.
I just got so excited about AutoGPT that I have one of my teams setting up an interface so we can run our own AutoGPT experiments. I’ll set up a server so it doesn’t need to live on a local machine, and I’ll report back when they’ve cranked it out.
My guess is that if AutoGPT links into Upwork and Fiverr, and perhaps Midjourney and the like, most beginners will be able to “project manage” the creation of a new web business or app from start to finish. Future iterations might also manage growing a social media presence for a forthcoming website while coordinating with its user about the progress of other resources, like the people building for you on Upwork.
Scary and exciting are the right pair of words, and it would be a mistake to drop either one. The objections are real, and they’ll be argued for years. The experiments have already started.
I’ll keep the interface updated with the latest — and then it’s time to launch the passion projects.
