OpenAI Unveils ‘Deep Research’ Feature for ChatGPT, Aims to Take on Chinese AI Platform DeepSeek

As the competition with Chinese AI platform DeepSeek intensifies, OpenAI has added a new ‘deep research’ mode to ChatGPT. The new feature allows users to

OpenAI has unveiled a new “deep research” mode for ChatGPT, allowing users to conduct multi-step research for complex tasks.

The new feature, announced by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on Friday, enables ChatGPT to perform complex research tasks on the web and generate a report.

“today we launch deep research, our next agent. this is like a superpower; experts on demand!” Altman tweeted.

“it can go use the internet, do complex research and reasoning, and give you back a report. it is really good, and can do tasks that would take hours/days and cost hundreds of dollars.”

Deep Research is billed as OpenAI’s second AI agent, following the launch of Operator AI for browser-related tasks last month. It is powered by OpenAI’s latest o3 reasoning model, which is optimized for web browsing and data analysis.

According to OpenAI, Deep Research can search, interpret, and analyze large amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the web to generate a comprehensive report, bringing its capabilities closer to those of a research analyst.

The company claims that deep research queries will take between 5 and 30 minutes to complete, and the chatbot will notify users when their research is finished.

While Deep Research currently only supports text output, OpenAI plans to introduce embedded images, data visualizations, and other analytical output in the coming weeks.

In an X post, Altman provided a brief example of how Deep Research works.

“people will post lots of great examples, but here is a fun one: i am in japan right now and looking for an old NSX. i spent hours searching unsuccessfully for the perfect one. i was about to give up and deep research just…found it,” he wrote.

“it is very compute-intensive and slow, but it’s the first ai system that can do such a wide variety of complex, valuable tasks. going live in our pro tier now, with 100 queries per month. plus, team, and enterprise will come soon, and then free tier.”

However, OpenAI has also noted in its blog that deep research, like other AI tools from the company, has been known to “hallucinate.”

“Deep research may struggle to differentiate authoritative information from rumor, and currently exhibits weakness in confidence calibration, often failing to convey uncertainty accurately,” the blog post reads.