Anthropic's AI Agents: Automating Tasks with Virtual Assistance

Anthropic's new AI agents can autonomously perform tasks using commands, showcasing significant advancements in artificial intelligence capabilities.

### Advancements in AI: Automating Tasks with Low-Level AI Agents
* 🤖 This week, Anthropic introduced low-level AI agents capable of **performing tasks on our behalf**, demonstrating a **significant leap in AI capabilities**.
* 💻 By simply issuing a command, the AI can **autonomously navigate the web**, such as finding **popular videos on a YouTube channel** and compiling data into a **spreadsheet without any manual input**.
* 🔧 Setting up this feature involves **installing Docker and configuring an API key**, which, while not overly complex, requires **several steps to get started**.
* 🌐 After installation, users can interact with the AI through a **virtual desktop environment**, allowing it to **execute commands like gathering weather data and populating spreadsheets**.
* ⚠ However, the AI does face limitations, such as a **rate limit on requests**, which can hinder its ability to **complete multi-step processes seamlessly**.
* 💳 Upgrading to a paid tier can **increase the request limit**, allowing for **smoother operation and more extensive task execution** without interruptions.
* 🖌 Despite some bugs, such as difficulties in drawing tasks, the AI's ability to **automate various digital tasks** showcases the **potential for future enhancements** in AI technology.
* 💡 For those interested in exploring AI tools further, resources like **Future Tools** provide access to the **latest innovations and tutorials** in the AI space.

Anthropic launched something amazing this week, and we officially have low-level AI agents that can go and do work on our behalf for us now. So, check this out. I can give it a command like find the five most popular videos on Matt Wolf's YouTube channel and add the dates and title of each of them to a spreadsheet. Press enter and watch as the tool opens Firefox for me, navigates to YouTube for me, searches out Matt Wolf, clicks into my channel for me, clicks on the video tab, sorts it by most popular, opens up a spreadsheet for me, and then watch as one by one it adds each of the titles of my most popular videos and pulls in the time since it was released. It just scraped it straight from my YouTube channel and is creating the spreadsheet hands-free. It just went through that whole process and just did each of the steps until I have the spreadsheet that you see on the screen right now. I'm talking as it's doing it. I'm not doing anything. This is crazy that we're at this point with AI where

It can go and use tools and do work for us on our behalf by giving it prompts. You want to know how I did this? Let's break it down. All right, so let's go ahead and set up this new computer use feature. Now, it's not the most intuitive process to set it up. Like, you can't just use it inside of CLA right now. You have to install some stuff on your computer and set up your API key, and it's really not that complicated, but it's not as simple as just going to a simple website and being able to use the tools. So, the first thing you need to do in order to set this up is we're going to install Docker on our computer. So, if we head on over to docker.io, after about a minute or so, we have Docker installed. So, I'll go ahead and close out of this. Now that Docker's installed, let's just go ahead and open it up in the setup process. We're just going to go ahead and use the recommended settings, click finish, and

Now I've got Docker set up on my computer. So now that we've got Docker installed and running, we're going to click on this little terminal button here. This says a terminal directly in Docker desktop. Click that. Go ahead and enable your terminal here. What we need now is a cloud API key. To get that, we're going to go to console.anthropic.com, and you're going to need to log in. I logged in with my Google account. You're going to see a menu that looks like this. Go ahead and click get API keys and create an API key for the name. I'm just going to put test key. You can name it whatever you want. It doesn't really matter. It's just so you know what you created that key for. I'm actually going to delete this key after the video, so not a big deal. And I'm going to save it to my default workspace and click add. Then we'll get this API key here. I'll go ahead and copy that. I have this little snippet of code here. I'm going to put

this code in the description so you can easily copy and paste it on your computer. But we need to do something with this code first. So here you can see anthropic API key equals and then dollar sign anthropic API key. We're going to go ahead and select this whole section where it says dollar sign anthropic API key and we're going to paste in that API key that we just grabbed from the console here. Now we're going to copy this entire code that we just created again. It'll be in the description. And let's open up Docker again. I'm going to go ahead and click on this terminal button and then paste this code right into my terminal and hit enter. And you can see it's firing up this whole thing for us. It takes less than a minute. And when it's done, you'll see this little call to action that says open Local Host colon 8080 in your browser to begin. I just click on this. You'll see that it opens up Local Host 8080 and it also has

like a fake desktop over here on the right, and I can give it commands. So, you can see we've got like Excel, we've got like a terminal, Firefox, PDF viewer, calculator, like a paint app, and various things that it can use on this desktop. Now, I can't actually do anything on this desktop unless I click on toggle screen control. If I click on this, now I have access to actually use the desktop myself. But I don't want to use the desktop myself; I want the AI to use the desktop. Now, over on the left, we can give it commands, and it will do multi-step processes and use the various tools that are available. So, I can give it a command like find the weather for the next 3 days in San Diego and then create a spreadsheet that contains each date and the high and low temperatures. Let's see if it can actually run this process. You can see it says running agent, and it says, I'll help you get the weather information in San Diego and create a spreadsheet tool use computer. Now it's

opening up Firefox. I'm not doing any of this. It's opening up Firefox on its own. It took a screenshot to see that it was actually using Firefox. Then it typed in San Diego weather forecast for me, figured out the temperatures. Now it opened up an Excel spreadsheet. Again, I am not controlling the desktop at all. It's literally just taking screenshots every so often to figure out what it needs to do next. So now it's got a spreadsheet open, and it ran into its first error here. It says runtime error: number of request tokens has exceeded your per minute rate limit. So apparently, it has some limitations where if it needs to go through too many steps to get you to your end result, it falls apart. But let's go ahead and see what happens if I just type please continue the process. See, it says running agent again, and it seems like it's getting back on track. Now it just added the date column, the high temperature, and the low temperature column. I'm not doing any of this. Added the date, the high temperature.

now the low temperature for October 23rd. Now it's doing the same thing for October 24th. This is based on all of the information that it just found by searching the web. So it searched Firefox for weather in San Diego for the next 3 days, found that information, opened up a spreadsheet, created the spreadsheet for me, and then filled out all the details on the spreadsheet. Now it's actually saving the file as San Diego weather. If I scroll through, you can see each step: tool, use, computer input, action, type, text, date. You can see it added the date in this first column here. And then what it does is it takes the action, takes a screenshot to see the current state of the computer, takes the next action. See, you can see here it made the high temperature column and then took a screenshot to kind of confirm it did everything right. Then it added the third column for low temperature, took a screenshot to make sure everything was looking good, and it went through the process of doing the thing, taking a screenshot, doing the thing, taking a

screenshot to confirm that it's actually going through each of the steps properly, and our final result here is a spreadsheet that I can click around on, and it's got the date, the high temperature, and the low temperature. If I open up Firefox here, you can see this is where it grabbed the data from San Diego weather forecast, and it grabbed it for the next 3 days. Here, I'm going to go ahead and refresh and start over so my chat window on the left is clean. Let's tell it to find a photo of Matt Wolf, the YouTuber, download it, and then resize it so the height is 500 pixels. And let's go ahead and let it run that. Let's see if it will automatically do all these steps. My hands are off of it now, so it's looking at what's currently on the screen to figure out what it needs to do. It sees we got Firefox with the weather. It just did a search for Matt Wolf, YouTuber. Now it's clicking on the images tab to find some photos.

and once again, it looks like I ran into that same error code: rate limit error. The number of request tokens has exceeded your per-minute rate limit. I can also contact sales at Anthropics to discuss my options for a rate limit increase, but let's go ahead and do what I did last time and just tell it to please continue, and it picks up where it left off. You can see it's saving the image here. It took a screenshot to see the current state of things, and now it won't even continue even when I type please continue. So apparently, that's just too many steps for it to handle right now. But the big idea is we can see where this is all headed. I'm going to go ahead and refresh this again, get a whole new setup going. You can see if I go back to my Anthropics console here under my limits, you can see it's got five requests per minute on Cloud 3.5 Sonet, which is what it's actually using. So apparently, it's just sort of moving through those steps too fast to where I'm

hitting that limit. Okay, so what I just did was I entered some credit card details on the billing section so that I'm no longer on what they called the free tier. Now I'm on tier one, and it looks like it upgraded my requests per minute to 50 instead of five. So now I should be able to go back and use this agent feature without it sort of hitting those rate limits. So now let's try this again, hopefully with an increased rate limit. I'm going to use the prompt once again: find an image of Matt Wolf, the YouTuber, download it, and then resize it so that the height is 500 pixels. And let's let it do its thing, hands off. I'm not doing anything. It took a picture of the screen, says it's going to open up Firefox now. It's opened up Firefox, did a quick search for Matt Wolf, YouTuber, found a bunch of images, went and clicked to the images tab. Now this is a little bit slower than what you're seeing; I'm cutting out some of the gaps.

in the video to make it feel like it's moving along, but there is a little bit of a delay between each of these steps because what it's doing is it's looking at a screenshot to see the current state of the screen. And then what it is doing after it looks at the screenshot is it decides the next action. Like right now, it sees that it's on a file naming section, so it named the file it downloaded as Untitled JPEG. And now we can see it's using a command down here to try to resize the image that it just downloaded. So this is actually pretty insane. I want to test one last thing 'cause there's like a little paint program here. Let's tell it to open paint and draw a stick figure. Let's see if it can draw. I don't even know what's going to happen here. Okay, so it opened up a tool called color paint here. Now let's draw a stick figure. A head, a circle, vertical line for the body, arms, horizontal lines, legs, two diagonal lines.

so now it's looking at the screen and uh let's see does it actually draw the stuff or is it stuck in a loop seems to be stuck on the drawing step doesn't quite seem to be figuring out how to draw an actual picture right now there theoretically should be a circle already here but we're not seeing it I'm going to go ahead and stop this one it doesn't seem to be uh getting the point doesn't seem to be able to actually draw what it's supposed to be drawing but we can get the concept we can see what anthropic is going for with this we give it a command of what we want it to do and it will actually go browse Firefox for us it will open up a spreadsheet and enter data for us it will do research for us it will download files for us it will save files for us it will run commands in the terminal for us now this is running inside of a virtual computer this isn't actually running on my computer this is all virtual here so

anything that actually happens on this fake computer here isn't really affecting my real computer, but we can see all of the tools that they're demonstrating it can use. Now, pretty wild stuff. We're getting this much closer to actual AI agents. Now, this is technically an AI agent, but we've seen in this demo that it still leaves a little bit to be desired. It still runs into rate limit issues even when I upgrade it and have a limit of 50 requests per minute. It actually still hit my rate limit when I was trying some of my things. Also, it was trying to draw like a stick figure by going left click drag on these coordinates, but for whatever reason, nothing was actually happening inside of our paint program. But it did manage to complete my command where I asked it to look up the weather for me and then open up a spreadsheet and then enter all the details of the weather in the spreadsheet. It did manage to do a search for my face and downloaded an image and then resize that image when I asked it.

to draw a stick figure, it did go and actually install a new paint program to use, but then couldn't quite figure out how to draw the stick figure. It's pretty dang impressive where this is all headed. Again, still a little bit to be desired. There's still some bugs. This is still a really early demo, but nonetheless, really fun to play with, really cool to put it through its motions and see what it's capable of. I'm excited to dig in even more and play with it some more and figure out what sort of agentic tasks I can get it to do. But I wanted to make a super quick video for you, show off what it's capable of, what it's not quite good at yet from my own testing, and ideally make it super easy for you to go follow these exact instructions, install this agent on your computer, and put it through its motions, see what it can do. It's really fun. It's really cool to see a tool actually take actions for us now and use these various tools. Really excited to see this improve over time.

Hopefully, you enjoyed this video. Hopefully, you learned something at the very least. Hopefully, you could go and play around and run with your own AI agent yourself. Uh, if you're curious about the cost, I've been playing with it for a couple of minutes here. I did add $25 to it just to sort of increase my rate limit there. All of my messing around that I did just for this video cost me about a buck 50. So, it's still fairly inexpensive. If you were to build this into a software app and it was using it a lot, it would add up quickly. But just playing around with it, you're going to spend, you know, a couple bucks maybe. If you want to find out about a whole bunch of other cool AI tools, check out Future Tools, where I curate all of the cool tools I come across. Also, check out the AI news page. Any new big breaking AI news that comes out gets listed on this page pretty quickly after it happens. And there's a free newsletter where I'll send the coolest tools and

the most important news directly to your inbox. I'll also hook you up with the AI income database, which is a sort of list of cool ways to make money using various AI tools. Just kind of a fun thing that I put together, but that's free for you if you join the newsletter. Again, all free over at Future tools. And uh, that's what I got for you today. Hopefully, you enjoyed this. If you like videos like this, you want to stay in the loop with the AI news, you want the latest AI tutorials, you want to know how to use all these cool AI softwares that are coming out, make sure you like this video and you subscribe to this Channel, and I'll make sure more videos like this show up in your YouTube feed. Thank you once again for nerding out with me today. Really, really appreciate you. See you in the next one. Bye-bye.

How To Install and Use Claude's New AI Agent

AI, No-Code, Tech, Futurism - I'm a tech nerd and talk about tech nerd stuff

Matt Wolfe

Anthropic has launched low-level AI agents that can perform tasks on our behalf, such as navigating websites and creating spreadsheets.

The setup process involves installing Docker and obtaining a cloud API key from Anthropic.

Once set up, the AI agent can execute commands hands-free, demonstrating the powerful capabilities of AI in automating work.

The process begins by pasting the Anthropic API key into the provided code and running it in the Docker terminal.

This launches a virtual desktop with various tools, allowing the AI to execute commands autonomously.

The AI attempts to find the weather for San Diego and create a spreadsheet, but encounters a rate limit error, which it resolves by continuing the process and successfully adding the necessary columns to the spreadsheet.

The program successfully retrieved San Diego's weather data for the next three days, created a spreadsheet, and filled in the details.

It used screenshots to confirm each step of the process.

The program then attempted to find and download a photo of YouTuber Matt Wolf, but encountered a rate limit error, causing a temporary halt in its actions.

Upgrading to Tier One for Increased Requests

The user upgraded to tier one by entering credit card details, increasing their requests per minute from five to fifty.

They tested the agent feature by prompting it to find, download, and resize an image of Matt Wolf, the YouTuber.

The agent successfully opened Firefox, searched for images, downloaded one, and attempted to resize it, showcasing its ability to perform tasks in a virtual environment.

The AI agent demo shows impressive tool usage but struggles with rate limits and executing certain tasks.

It successfully completed commands like looking up the weather, opening a spreadsheet, and downloading an image, but had difficulty drawing a stick figure.

The demo highlights the agent's potential and leaves room for improvement, making it an exciting tool to experiment with.

The speaker shares their experience with an AI agent, noting that it only cost them $1.

They offer a curated resource, Future Tools, for discovering other AI tools, along with an AI news page and a free newsletter for updates.

The speaker encourages viewers to like the video and subscribe to the channel for more AI-related content.