Auto-GPT - What It Is and How to Install and Use It

Auto-GPT: What It Is and How to Install and Use It

What is Auto-GPT?

If you're familiar with ChatGPT, then you'll be excited to hear about its bigger, better cousin: AutoGPT. This incredible open-source project takes the intelligent capabilities of ChatGPT and amplifies them with the ability to organize and execute specific tasks. Long story short, while you need to prompt every single command to ChatGPT to reach a goal, AutoGPT is smart enough to achieve it on its own.

What can Auto-GPT do for you?

AutoGPT can be used as an ai agent for 

• Internet search and scheduling
• autonomous coding and debugging
• as an autonomous Twitter bot
• and much more.

Here you can see an example video of what AutoGPT can do.

AutoGPT has Internet access for searching and gathering information, management of its long-term and short-term memory, GPT-4 instances for texting, access to popular websites and platforms, and file storage and aggregation with GPT-3.5.

Before we begin here are two things you should know:

• Be aware that we are using ChatGPT API behind the scenes, therefore costs can occur.
• You need a paid OpenAI API Key in order to work with Auto-GPT

Section 1: Requirements

Before we dive into the installation process, let's go over the necessary requirements for AutoGPT. The following are the hardware and software specifications required to run AutoGPT:

Hardware:

• 4GB RAM
• 2.0 GHz processor or higher
• 20GB hard disk space

Software:

• Python 3.6 or later. You can easily install it on Linux with ( sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python )

• Git

• Pip

Dependencies:

• PyTorch
• Transformers
• CUDA (optional)

It is crucial to ensure that these requirements are met before proceeding with the installation process. Additionally, it is essential to avoid any potential conflicts by uninstalling any previous versions of PyTorch or Transformers.

Section 2: Install Auto-GPT

Now that we have gone over the requirements let's jump into the installation process. 

2.1 Clone project locally

First, we need to clone Auto-GPT project locally, we can easily do this:

git clone https://github.com/Torantulino/Auto-GPT.git

Next cd into the newly created Auto-GPT directory and run the following command to install Auto-GPT’s dependencies. This will take a minute or so.

2.2 Insert API Key

Now we need to use OpenAI's API Key so that Auto-GPT can use the service programmatically.

You can generate an API key here https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys

Remember to keep your key confidential as it acts like a password to access GPT from your account. 

Look for a while called .env.template. Rename it to .env

Open the .env file and paste in your just created OpenAI API Key on the place where "YOUR_OPENAI_API_KEY" is. Don't forget to save the file.

⚠️ You need a paid OpenAI API Key, otherwise, you will receive a message like this: 

Please double check that you have setup a PAID OpenAI API Account. You can read more here: https://significant-gravitas.github.io/Auto-GPT/setup/#getting-an-api-key

Section 3: Testing and Verification

Now let's test if we can run Auto-GPT. Type into the terminal

python python3 -m autogpt

If all went as expected, you will be greeted with a message welcoming you back. You can now give Auto-GPT your first task.

Conclusion

I hope that this guide was helpful and that you can leverage AutoGPT for your indie hacking needs. I see AutoGPT as a virtual assistant that can help you to focus on what matters most to your indie business, providing value to your customer.