TFF #015 - Auto-GPT - Is Autonomous AI the Next Big Thing?

Read Time - 3 Mins

Hello, and welcome to a another edition of the Tech for Finance Newsletter, where we’re looking Autonomous AI.

What is Autonomous AI?

Autonomous AI, is AI that can be given an instruction, and then left to carry out that instruction until the goal is complete.

This may not seem like a big thing.

But it is…

Right now, with ChatGPT, you enter a single prompt, get your result, and then ask another prompt.

What can it do?

An autonomous AI agent can take an instruction and write it’s own prompts until a goal has been achieved.

It can:

Search the internet
Save files for reference
Run additional agents to complete sub-tasks

Auto-GPT, is an example of one of these Autonomous programs, driven by ChatGPT-4, that chains together LLM (Large Language Model) "thoughts", to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set.

If you go to the Auto-GPT Github page here, and scroll down you’ll be able to see a demo of it in action.

The example instruction is to search the internet to find an upcoming event, and then invent an original recipe to suit it.

What does this mean for finance?

Well, we might be getting closer to getting rid of those boring repetitive tasks you and your team do.

Right now, it’s still very early, the AI agents can get confused, and it can get very expensive to run lots of AI calls.

PLUS - With Auto-GPT you need to have access to the ChatGPT-4 API which not everyone does (I don’t).

But let’s say you DID have access to something like this in the not too distant future:

Could you set it a goal of decreasing your costs by 1%?
Could you set it a goal of improving your margin 5%?

OK, maybe we’re jumping the gun a bit with that.

But you could definitely:

Get it to search the internet gather benchmarking information and distil it into a format that works for a presentation
Get it to produce headcount planning scenarios based on skillsets of present and future employees and their salaries
Get it to produce all of the formulas for fully complete Actual vs Budget or Forecast

If you’re keen to see more use cases. Check out this Twitter Thread by my good friend Nicolas Boucher:

10 AutoGPT use cases for Business

The ChatGPT hype is already old...

AutoGPT is the new cool kid!

I have researched for you 10 use cases where you can use AutoGPT for businesses.

Let's go 👇

— Nicolas Boucher (@BoucherNicolas) April 12, 2023

If you are keen to try a basic version of Autonomous AI, check out AgentGPT here.

[NOTE - To use AgentGPT, you need an OpenAI API account, and you need to be setup for billing (not the free trial) - This is not a free service. You can get to your OpenAI billing on this link]

That’s it for this week.

Speak soon.

Adam

—

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