AutoGPT was the project that introduced the world to autonomous AI agents. Released in March 2023, it became one of the fastest-growing GitHub repositories in history, demonstrating that LLMs could be chained together to pursue multi-step goals without constant human direction. AutoGPT works by accepting a high-level goal from the user and then autonomously planning a series of sub-tasks to accomplish it. It can search the web, read and write files, execute Python code, interact with APIs, and use memory to maintain context across tasks — effectively acting as an AI employee that works toward an objective. The project has evolved significantly since its viral debut. AutoGPT now features a visual workflow builder, an Agent Protocol standard for interoperability, a cloud-hosted version (AutoGPT Cloud), and a marketplace for pre-built agents. Builders use AutoGPT to create specialized agents for tasks like market research, competitive analysis, content generation pipelines, and data processing. The open-source nature of AutoGPT means it can be self-hosted with full data control, customized with any LLM backend, and extended with custom tools and plugins. Its community has built thousands of extensions and agent templates. AutoGPT remains the reference implementation for autonomous AI agents and the starting point for understanding agentic AI architectures.