Artificial intelligence has already begun to change the way we conduct research, and now OpenAI just released a fresh update to ChatGPT that, it says, will open up "deep research" to just about anyone.
Following just days after its 03-mini reasoning model, the new deep research tool is launching today for ChatGPT Pro subscribers.
"Today we’re launching deep research in ChatGPT, a new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks," a blog post reads, promising that the model "accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours."
This new agent "can do work for you independently", acting on a series of prompts to "find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst".
It's powered by the upcoming o3 model of ChatGPT and is geared towards finance, science, policy and engineering research, while OpenAI also says that it can helpful for making purchasing decisions, too, helping run detailed product research (another shot across Google's bow, perhaps).
Using the new tool is simple, too. Users just need to select 'deep research' in the ChatGPT message composer and enter the query, with the option to attach additional context via files and spreadsheets.
Doing so will see articles cited in the sidebar, and the progress can be tracked there too. OpenAI says it can take five minutes to half an hour to complete a deep research task.
Limitations
OpenAI has stressed that there are limitations, however.
"It can sometimes hallucinate facts in responses or make incorrect inferences, though at a notably lower rate than existing ChatGPT models, according to internal evaluations."
"It may struggle with distinguishing authoritative information from rumors, and currently shows weakness in confidence calibration, often failing to convey uncertainty accurately. At launch, there may be minor formatting errors in reports and citations, and tasks may take longer to kick off. We expect all these issues to quickly improve with more usage and time."
Still, if you want to give it a whirl, you can do so today — providing you're paying for ChatGPT Pro.
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