What’s better than an AI chatbot that can assist you with tasks? One that can do them for you. OpenAI continues to build out its AI agents in ChatGPT with the launch of Deep Research.
Deep Research
Earlier this month, OpenAI unveiled Deep Research, an AI agent that can conduct multi-step research for you by pulling a robust amount of information from the web and synthesizing those sources for you in a comprehensive report. Once prompted, Deep Research can work entirely independently; it’s like having a research analyst at your command.
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At launch, it was only accessible to ChatGPT Pro users, meaning you would have to pay $200 per month. Now, Deep Research is rolling out to more paid subscribers, including ChatGPT Plus, Team, Edu, and Enterprise users. However, the added users will have 10 deep research queries per month, compared to the 120 deep research queries per month Pro users have access to.
OpenAI (@OpenAI), Deep research is now available to all ChatGPT Plus users, Team, Edu and Enterprise users
Depending on the task, each report can be generated in 5 to 30 minutes. During this time, you can do other tasks, maximizing your workflow productivity. The report is outputted in the chat. OpenAI also announced that deep research now includes embedded pictures with citations and is better at understanding files.
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OpenAI claims that the same task would take humans several hours. The agent is also designed to be good at finding niche content that would require humans performing multiple searches.
According to OpenAI, Deep Research is aimed at those who perform intensive knowledge work, such as in finance, science and policy, or engineering, and need reliable and thorough research. Each report includes a summary of what the agent thought and clear citations so that users can verify the information themselves.
It is a good idea to double-check a chatbot’s responses, as they are prone hallucinations. OpenAI warns Deep Research “can sometimes hallucinate facts in responses or make incorrect inferences, though at a notably lower rate than existing ChatGPT models, according to internal evaluations.” OpenAI added that the agent may struggle to distinguish authoritative from rumors, and can fail correctly to convey uncertainty, highlighting the importance of human review.
Performance comparison
OpenAi’s Blog Post that announced the feature includes the same results side-by-side of GPT-4o and Deep Research in order to demonstrate how the same prompt can produce very different results. The results generated by Deep Research were more robust and organized.
Screenshot by Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Deep Research also outperformed GPT-4o on Humanity’s Last Exam, a recently launched AI benchmark exam by Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety (CAIS) that tests various subjects on expert-level questions. Deep Research scored a 26.6% accuracy, outperforming GPT-4o, Grok-2, Claude 3,5 Sonnet, Gemini Thinking, o1, and even o3-mini high, which had just scored the highest score a couple of days prior, as highlighted by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
On friday, “humanity’s last exam” had a high score of 13%. Now on sunday, deep analysis gets 26.6%.
– Alone Altman, @sama””https://twitter.com/sama/status/1886220281565381078?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw””> OpenAI published the performance results of Deep Research on February 3, 2025. This included GAIA, an external benchmark that evaluates AI in real-world situations, and an internal evaluation of expert level tasks across different areas within deep research.
Alternatives
If you want access to the feature now but don’t want to pay $200 per month, Google has a similar feature, also called Deep Research, that is available to all of its Gemini Advanced users through theDeep Research.
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xAI has also recently launched its own AI agent, DeepSearch. DeepSearch is now available to X Premium, Premium+ and Grok users. According to Grok, the X Premium membership costs $8 per month, or $84 per annum, while Premium+ membership costs $40 per month, or $395 per annum. X.
Microsoft announced a feature called Think Deeper that allows users to leverage OpenAI’s O1 reasoning to deliver better-quality responses to complicated prompts. It does not have the agentic capabilities of OpenAI, Grok, or Gemini. The best part is that it’s completely free.
