Ever wish you could just tell your computer what to do and have it actually listen? I just saw this incredible video from an AI professional that shows we’re getting seriously close to that reality.
This innovator got his hands on a new experimental tool from Anthropic that lets an AI agent use a computer on your behalf. I’m talking about giving it a text command and watching it open a browser, search for info, and even create a spreadsheet, all by itself. It’s wild!
In the video, the creator puts the agent through its paces. It’s pretty mind-blowing to watch.
Here’s a peek at what this expert got it to do:
- 🚀 Scrape YouTube Data: He prompted it to “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.” The agent opened Firefox, went to YouTube, found the channel, sorted the videos by popularity, opened a spreadsheet, and copied everything over. Hands-free!
- ☀️ Create a Weather Report: It successfully searched for the 3-day weather forecast in San Diego and compiled the dates with the high and low temperatures into a clean spreadsheet.
- 🖼️ Manage Image Files: The YouTuber also tasked it with finding a photo of himself, downloading it, and resizing it to a specific pixel height using terminal commands.
⚙️ How to Set It Up
The best part is that the video provides a full step-by-step guide to get this running on your own machine. It involves installing Docker and getting a free API key from Anthropic. It’s a bit technical, but the person who shared it makes it super easy to follow.
He even provides the exact command you need to run in your terminal.
✍️ Get Started With This Command
The original creator shared this code in the video description to get the tool running. You’ll just need to add your Anthropic API key first!
“docker run -e ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=$ANTHROPIC_API_KEY -v $HOME/.anthropic:/home/computeruse/.anthropic -p 5900:5900 -p 8501:8501 -p 6080:6080 -p 8080:8080 -it ghcr.io/anthropics/anthropic-quickstarts:computer-use-demo-latest”
It’s important to know that this is still a very early demo. The expert was transparent about its limitations: it sometimes hits API rate limits (though he shows a fix for that) and failed at a creative task like drawing a stick figure. Still, the potential here is a massive game-changer.
For the full deep-dive and the complete setup tutorial, make sure to watch the original video from the creator. He breaks it all down perfectly!