Introducing Auto-GPT

In the Preface, I wrote about what Auto-GPT is and where it came from, but I was asking myself, “Why would anyone read this book?”

I mean, it is what it is – an automated form of artificial intelligence (AI) that may or may not help you do some tasks or be a fun toy that can be very spooky sometimes, right?

I want you to have a clear understanding of what you can or cannot do with it.

Of course, the more creative you get, the more it can do, but sometimes the boundaries appear to be more or less random. For example, let’s say you just built a house-building robot that for no apparent reason refuses to make the front door blue, even though you really want a blue door; it keeps going off-topic or even starts explaining what doors are.

Auto-GPT can be very frustrating when it comes to these limitations as they come from a combination of OpenAI’s restrictions (which they give in their GPT model) and the humans who write and edit Auto-GPT (along with you – the user who gives it instructions). What first appears to be a clear instruction can result in a very different outcome just by changing one single character.

For me, this is what makes it fascinating – you can always expect it to behave like a living being that can randomly choose to do otherwise and have its own mind.

Note

Always keep in mind that this is a fast-moving project, so code can and will be changed until this book is released. It may also be the case that you bought this book much later and Auto-GPT is completely different. Most of the content in this book focuses on version 0.4.1, but changes have been made and considered regarding version 0.5.0 as well.

For example, once I finished the draft of this book, the “Forge” (an idea we had at a team meeting) had already been implemented. This was an experiment that allowed other developers to build their own Auto-GPT variation.

The Auto-GPT project is a framework that contains Auto-GPT, which we’ll be working with in this book, and can start other agents made by other developers. Those agents are in the repositories of the programmers who added them, so we won’t dive into them here.

In this chapter, we aim to introduce you to Auto-GPT, including its history and development, as well as LangChain. This chapter will help you understand what Auto-GPT is, its significance, and how it has evolved. By the end of this chapter, you will have a solid foundation to build upon as we explore more advanced topics in the subsequent chapters.

We will cover the following main topics in this chapter:

• Overview of Auto-GPT
• History and development of Auto-GPT
• Introduction to LangChain