What are GPT Agents, and How Do They Work?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are evolving rapidly—revolutionizing several sectors and departments. 

The global AI market is projected to reach $1811.8 billion—expanding at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 37.3%. This statistic shows the rapid advancement and increasing adoption of AI technologies, and one such new-age technology is GPT Agents. 

You may have definitely heard of and used tools like ChatGPT, which completes just one task at a time—taking input for a query and returning an output for the same. 

But GPT Agents work beyond that, think beyond that, and generate human-like responses using advanced algorithms. Also known as autonomous agents, GPT Agents respond to queries, states, and events independent from the original query asked by the user—generating the responses until it answers the asked question and satisfies the user’s query intent. 

If this was too difficult to understand, don’t worry. 

We’ll delve more into understanding what GPT Agents are with examples, how they work, their benefits and use cases, and the future scope of this advanced AI technology. 

What are GPT Agents?

Before understanding GPT Agents collectively, let’s first break the terms down and see what GPT and agents mean separately. 

GPT, or Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a core deep learning and Machine Learning (ML) model that powers Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and is trained on large datasets to generate human-like responses for a given prompt. 

An agent is a large language model setup that operates and keeps running iteratively to complete the defined task. They comprise complex workflows where the LLM talks to itself without human interruption—making it different from those used in ChatGPT, where you get a single response for a question asked. 

Thus, considering the above two interpretations, we can define GPT agents as AI-powered programs that, when given a specific task, can create, complete, prioritize, and reprioritize tasks through self-directed instructions in a loop—producing actions at each iteration to achieve the end goal. 

Since GPT agents are trained on vast data, they can easily understand the context and learn the patterns and language nuances—making them generate relevant and coherent responses. With the underlying deep learning technology, GPT agents can closely mimic human behavior and conversation—making them extremely useful for customer support and service, virtual assistance, and content automation and creation. 

Significance of GPT Agents In NLP

GPT Agents significantly impact Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to their ability to generate human-like output and state-of-the-art performance for several tasks, including text completion, language translation, sentiment analysis, question-answering, and more. 

Due to their versatility and ability to generate human-like text, GPT agents majorly contribute to content generation, chatbots and virtual assistance, and creative writing—understanding context and generating relevant prompts, which are valuable in NLP. 

Besides, GPT agents also play a huge role in translation and multilingual applications in NLP. GPT agents are typically fine-tuned for translation, enabling cross-language communication. 

Moreover, GPT agents can also address challenges in NLP, including bias and discrimination, to enable inclusivity and create an ethical and better social impact. 

Hence, due to the effectiveness of large-scale pre-trained language models that improve content generation and automation, transfer learning, and fostering research and development—GPT agents have become a cornerstone for modern NLP. 

How Do GPT Agents Work? 

GPT agents or autonomous agents use the transformer architecture to handle sequential data and understand and generate human-like output text based on the received input. 

In simple words, GPT agents understand and analyze the core objective and come up with sequential tasks to complete them one by one and achieve the final goal. 

However, besides this, GPT agents also comprise a range of other abilities that enable them to complete any digital task a human is capable of, including: 

• Access to browsing the internet and using plugins and applications

• Accessing short-term and long-term memory 

• Access to payment forms like a credit card

• Accessing large language models (LLMs) like GPT to answer, analyze, summarize, or provide an opinion. 

These GPT agents work in different ways. While some operate behind the scenes—without the user being aware of what’s going on in hindsight, some autonomous agents are visible, allowing the users to view and follow along with each step and through the process behind the AI. 

A good enough dataset that acts as a knowledge base, memory, techniques like reinforcement learning, and decision-making is the foundation of the working behind a GPT agent. 

Here’s a representation of the framework a GPT agent follows with the step-by-step breakdown of each stage. 

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• The user provides a task or an objective to a GPT agent. 

• The task then goes to the task queue, which passes the objective to the ‘Execution Agent.’

• From the Execution Agent, the task goes to the ‘Memory’ and is stored there. 

• It then adds context to the objective, learning from its knowledge base, which is then sent to the Execution Agent and passed on to the ‘Task Creation Agent.’

• Taking the objective and context into consideration, the Task Creative Agent now creates new tasks and sends them over to the Task Queue. 

• The tasks then go to the ‘Task Prioritization Agent,’ which prioritizes the tasks. 

• Once the tasks are prioritized, the Task Prioritization Agent sends the cleaned task list to the Task Queue, and the process continues until the objective is met and the user gets an answer to the question asked. 

Thus, GPT agents demonstrate the power of AI-powered LLMs to autonomously create new tasks, prioritize tasks, and reprioritize them again until the objective is met—showcasing the adaptable nature of the AI-powered large language models. 

While this explained the technical working of the large language model, let’s look at an example for a better and clearer understanding of how a GPT agent works. 

Let’s consider a GPT agent to which we give a prompt, “Find the latest advancements in AI and write a summary about it.” 

• The first obvious step is to give a relevant prompt to the GPT agent. 

• The GPT agent reads and tries to understand the objective through OpenAI’s GPT-4 and creates tasks to complete the goal. 

• For instance, the first task the agent can come up with is “Search Google for the latest advancements in AI.” 

• The agent searches on Google about the latest advancements in the field of AI, finds a list of the top articles, and outputs the list of the links—completing the first task. 

• However, this isn’t the end goal and doesn’t meet the core objective. Hence, the GPT agent analyzes the objective again: to find the latest AI advancements and then write a short summary about it. Based on this understanding and the first task is completed, the GPT agent comes up with its next set of tasks. 

• For example, it can come up with tasks like 1. Write a summary of the research done, 2. Read through the content of the top links to find the latest advancements in AI. 

• Before going ahead, the GPT agent realizes that it shouldn’t write a summary but instead read through the content and then write the summary. Thus, based on this understanding, the agent prioritizes the tasks to 1. Read through the content of the top links to find the latest advancements in AI, and 2. Write a summary of the research done. 

• The GPT agent reads through the article’s content and then circles back to the task queue to check its next task: writing a short summary. 

• The agent then writes the summary and sends it as a final output, satisfying the intent and meeting the end objective. 

Thus, this is the simple GPT agent workflow with a simple example. 

Use Cases of GPT Agents 

Before getting into the benefits, let’s look at the different use cases of GPT Agents. 

• Personal assistance/accessing the web: You can use autonomous agents to complete several tasks in a sequence, including searching the web to look for links/answers to queries, managing finances and calendars, booking travel or other events, and monitoring wellness and healthy activities. 

• Content generation: GPT agents can generate high-quality content, such as long-form blogs, marketing copies, and social media posts—saving time for content marketers and creators. 

• Interactive gaming: GPT agents can also be widely used to handle interactive gaming, like developing adaptive AI characters, creating interactive and intelligence NCPs, and offering in-game contextualized interaction to gamers. 

• Customer support: GPT agents can effectively handle customer support queries via chatbots—providing support on websites, applications, and messaging platforms. They take customer queries about past transactions, payments, or questions about the website’s products or services. 

• Financial management: GPT agents also offer financial assistance, like offering researched financial advice, automating fraud detection and risk assessment, credit card assessments, compliance management, reporting, etc. 

These are just a few use cases of GPT agents, but their use cases extend to a wide range of other purposes, including predictive analysis, interactive storytelling, research and data analysis, healthcare and medical applications, and more. 

Benefits of GPT Agents

GPT agents are revolutionizing business operations. Here are the crucial benefits of GPT agents: 

• Improved efficiency: By automating redundant tasks, like product research, creating an article outline, or handling customer support—GPT agents can streamline multiple sequential tasks, enhancing the overall productivity and efficiency of the business. 

• Enhanced decision-making: Since GPT agents are trained on large data sets, they provide valuable insights to companies by leveraging ML capabilities and data analytics, allowing them to make better-informed decisions. 

• Competitive edge: By generating key insights and automating workflows, GPT agents can help companies stay ahead of the curve and beat the competitive market. 

• Scalability: GPT agents can easily adapt and evolve per a business’s changing needs and requirements as their processes become more complex—making them scalable and highly versatile solutions. 

• Cost efficiency: GPT agents help businesses reduce labor and operational costs by automating processes, identifying areas of improvement, and improving resource allocation. 

• Complex problem-solving: The ability of GPT agents to recall past actions and experiences and process a huge data set makes it an ideal solution to solve complex problems at hand. 

Now, we will explore the limitations of GPT agents.

GPT Agents Limitations

GPT agents also come with a significant amount of drawbacks and limitations, including: 

• Security concerns: Many GPT agents built on the LLM foundation modes lack built-in tools or safeguards required to ensure data security and integrity—making security a major concern when using GPT agents. 

• Safety concerns: When we use GPT agents for traffic controls and autonomous vehicles, there’s always a safety concern, like minor or major injuries due to limited human controls and additional sensors. 

• Rogue AI possibilities: One of the biggest concerns of GPT agents is they are being used and trained for malicious purposes and go rogue than the original training intent—making it difficult to take control back. 

• Bias and ethical concerns: GPT agents can provide inappropriate and biased output due to bias inherited in their training data. Hence, mitigating ethical differences and biases and ensuring fairness is a major challenge businesses face, especially when the training data sets comprise biases. 

• Lack of multimedia handling: GPT agents are primarily designed to work with text data and inputs, limiting their ability to work with multimedia and handle multimodal data, such as audio, images, and video, without requiring additional specialized models. 

Being aware of the GPT agent’s limitations is also important to use them responsibly, safely, and ethically. 

Several GPT agents tools are available, including Agent GPT and Auto GPT, demonstrating the real-life use of GPT agents.

#1. Agent GPT

Agent GPT is a versatile and powerful open-source AI tool for configuring, creating, and deploying autonomous AI agents without continuous user input. You simply need to specify your objective, and Agent GPT, based on the GPT 3.5 architecture, does the rest. 

It generates high-quality text in real-time by chaining together multiple LLMs, allowing each deployed agent to recall previous tasks and experiences. 

This makes Agent GPT learn from its own previous experiences and produce much better and more accurate results with time.

#2. Auto-GPT

Auto-GPT is an open-source autonomous agent based on the OpenAI’s GPT-4 model that autonomously completes tasks to meet the user’s end goal. 

Created by Toran Bruce Richards, Auto-GPT is publicly available on GitHub and will soon be available on GUI/web app. It can seamlessly interact with applications, software, and local and online services, like word processors and web browsers, to complete a given task. 
Learn more about installing Auto-GPT through this simple and step-by-step guide.

#3. BabyAGI

BabyAGI is an open-source, independently managed, and GitHub-based Python script inspired by human cognitive development. 

This AI-powered task management system uses OpenAI and vector databases, such as Weaviate and Chroma, to create, prioritize, and execute tasks. It focuses on language learning, reinforcement learning, and cognitive development to learn and execute complex tasks.

#4. SuperAGI

SuperAGI is an autonomous AI framework that helps you develop and deploy autonomous GPT agents quickly, easily, and reliably. 

Thousands of companies, including giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tesla, and IBM, trust and use SuperAGI to automate their business processes and build autonomous applications. 

SuperAGI also provides templates to build and create simple software applications using specific goals and instructions. Other crucial features include agent memory storage, resource manager, performance telemetry, multiple vector databases, and looping detection heuristics. 

What The Future for GPT Agents Look Like? 

Currently, GPT agents are at their beginning stage of experimentation, development, failure, and success, where researchers and developers are trying new things and use cases to incorporate autonomous agents in the business workflows. 

While no commercialized products using GPT agents have been released yet as it’s still in the development phase, this will soon change. GPT agents are predicted to show up in every sector, automating processes like research and data analysis, education and learning, healthcare and medication, and the automobile industry. 

However, with the development and technological advancements of autonomous GPT agents, ensuring ethical bias, transparency, responsibility, and accountability will be crucial and a major challenge to overcome. 

It’ll be fun and exciting to see what GPT agents have in the future and how they’ll transform everyday business processes and workflows.

Next, check out ChatGPT with VS Code: the first step towards effortless coding.