How to setup Auto-GPT on macOS 💽

•AIsoftware
Back

Read on to find out how to easily install Auto-GPT on your Mac using Python, plus additional tips & tricks.

After a month of scrolling past the occasional tweet that referenced Auto-GPT and all of the cool things it can do, I finally decided to give it a go.

I've simplified and tailored the instructions specifically for macOS, and have done my best to make it accessible for anyone non-technical.

Steps to set up Auto-GPT on macOS:

  1. Get the code
  2. Set up your OpenAI account
  3. Setup your Auto-GPT environment
  4. Install Python 3
  5. Run Auto-GPT
  6. Bonus tips & tricks

1. Get the code

Download Auto-GPT from this zip file (opens in a new tab) or git clone the [Auto-GPT repository}(https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT (opens in a new tab)).

2. Set up your OpenAI account

  1. Sign-up for a developer account at OpenAI(https://platform.openai.com/overview (opens in a new tab)) if you don't already have one.
  2. Create an OpenAI API key (opens in a new tab) if you don't already have one.
  3. Make sure you have a paid OpenAI account by going to Billing within your OpenAI account (opens in a new tab).

3. Setup your Auto-GPT environment

If you unzip the zip file you downloaded/cloned in step 1, you should see a folder called Auto-GPT-master.

Within that, you should see a file called .env.template. If you don't see it, you might need to enable viewing hidden files on your Mac (opens in a new tab).

Now you can:

  1. Rename .env.template to .env
  2. Open .env in a text editor
  3. Update OPENAI_API_KEY=your-openai-api-key to be the API key you setup in the previous step (no quotes or anything after the =): OPENAI_API_KEY=skfeafaefefefesfsf

4. Install Python 3

You likely already have Python 3 on your Mac, as macOS installations have been including Python 3 since 2018.

If you're not sure, you can check by running python3 --version in your terminal. If you see something like Python 3.10.10, you're good to go.

Otherwise, you can install Python 3 with homebrew (opens in a new tab).

5. Run Auto-GPT

  1. Open your terminal
  2. Navigate to the Auto-GPT-master folder you downloaded/cloned in step 1 (e.g. cd ~/Downloads/Auto-GPT-master in terminal)
  3. Run ./run.sh in terminal

You should see something like this:

Missing packages:
beautifulsoup4, colorama, distro, openai, playsound, python-dotenv, pyyaml, readability-lxml, requests, tiktoken, gTTS, docker, duckduckgo-search, google-api-python-client, pinecone-client, redis, orjson, Pillow, selenium, webdriver-manager, jsonschema, tweepy, click, charset-normalizer, spacy, en-core-web-sm, coverage, flake8, numpy, pre-commit, black, isort, gitpython, auto-gpt-plugin-template, mkdocs, pymdown-extensions, openapi-python-client, pytest, asynctest, pytest-asyncio, pytest-benchmark, pytest-cov, pytest-integration, pytest-mock, vcrpy, pytest-recording
Installing missing packages...

And then after a few minutes, you should see something like this:

Welcome to Auto-GPT!  run with '--help' for more information.
Create an AI-Assistant:  input '--manual' to enter manual mode.
  Asking user via keyboard...
I want Auto-GPT to:

Now that you have Auto-GPT running, try giving it a few fun easy tasks to start, eg I want Auto-GPT to: summarize the latest news in the United States or `

Potential issues

  1. python: command not found

If instead you see

./run.sh: line 2: python: command not found
./run.sh: line 8: python: command not found

Then the simplest solution is to open run.sh in your text editor, and replace each instance of python with python3 and pip with pip3 and then re-run ./run.sh.

  1. DOUBLE CHECK CONFIGURATION error

This can happen for at least two reasons: either you don't have a paid OpenAI account, and/or you don't have access to GPT 4.

Make sure you have a paid account with OpenAI. When I first started trying out Auto-GPT, I kept getting an error message that said:

DOUBLE CHECK CONFIGURATION  Please double check that you have setup a PAID OpenAI API Account. You can read more here: https://docs.agpt.co/setup/#getting-an-api-key

It took me a minute to realize that the Auto-GPT docs also reiterated this point and that I did not in fact have a paid account with proper billing info attached 🤦‍♂️

If you don't have access to GPT 4, then use ./run.sh --gpt3only instead of ./run.sh to run Auto-GPT.

6. Tips & tricks

  1. Be specific. If you want Auto-GPT to use the internet or to write to a file, it can help to specify that.
  2. Think big with your tasks. You can use Auto-GPT to help you:
    • buy products online
    • to do research synthesizing a bunch of search engine results into a single document since it can make Google requests itself
    • to write a blog post, a song, or code.
  3. Checkout the Ideas section of the Auto-GPT discussions for inspiration: https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/Auto-GPT/discussions/categories/ideas (opens in a new tab)

Additional resources:


Last Updated: Sun May 7 2023

Related

Post

First impressions of GPT-4

Mar 16 2023

Post

Vision Pro - A developer's experience

March 19 2024

Post

To 2023 and beyond

Dec 31 2022

Post

Building this site: data + dark mode

Feb 19 2023

Looking for more posts?


Monthly Newsletter

Coming soon - be the first to receive my new monthly newsletter.


Looking for a full-stack iOS/web developer for your project? Email me at hello@skyporch.co.
© Gabriel Uribe.RSS