AI Agents: the dawn of a new era

As you can read on Why GPT-4 is well under control, Large Language Models cannot act on their own. They are not autonomous ... unless you add another layer that can handle state, planning, memory, purpose, autonomy ...

The first of these semi-autonomous software built on top of GPT-4 and GPT-3 to go viral (top number of new stars on Github) was auto-GPT.

Please keep in mind that these softwares are not GPT-4 or any other LLM. They just use the power of GPT-4 to get smart, but they are external softwares. Their primary goal is to create some independent systems that tries to complete complex tasks in the most autonomous way, leveraging the capacities of LLMs like GPT-4.

Think of GPT-4 as the engine, and auto-GPT and the others listed down there as a self driving car: simply tell it where you want to go, and they'll try to get you there.

Auto-GPT

The first to go viral. Written in Python.

• Github project: more than 100k stars!!!
• AutoGPT.net: website dedicated to Auto-GPT.

Langchain

Framework to build applications (for example Agents) based on LLMs. Langchain website.

Here again, written in Python.

This page will be updated as I find or use new LLM based application building frameworks.

Perspectives

Large Language Models are very impressive when you chat with them in tools like chatGPT, but the real thing in the future will be LLM based Agents, that will be able to work for you in an autonomous way.

In the coming months, you are going to see a torrent of new start-ups, building hundreds of these agents to help you in every aspect of your life:

1. diet: not only will they organise your diet, but they'll order the proper food for you, explain what and how to cook, cheer you up when you find it hard to follow your diet, etc...
2. accounting: handle your banking activity, investments, complete your paperwork, organise your budget, find an good loan if you need one, ...

Honestly I could go on for hours listing any aspect of your life that these LLM powered agents will help you with, from health, mental-heath, education, socialising, organising, work ... we are entering a new era where things like auto-GPT and langchain will be the building blocks of a future world where Agents will help you in any aspects of your life.

As always, this will open new opportunities, make us more powerful and dependent at the same time. Technology has always been like that: from fire, to coal, to electricity and the Internet ... with each technological leap, our lives become richer, easier, and more sophisticated / complicated at the same time.

We've been doing that for thousands of years now, and it just keeps accelerating.