OpenAI has launched deep research in ChatGPT, a new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks.
According to the company, it accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.
Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work independently. Users will give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyse, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst.
Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimised for web browsing and data analysis, it leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the Internet, pivoting as needed in reaction to information it encounters.
In its statement announcing Deep research, OpenAI says is built for people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, policy, and engineering and need thorough, precise, and reliable research. It can be equally useful for discerning shoppers looking for hyper-personalised recommendations on purchases that typically require careful research, like cars, appliances, and furniture.
Outputs are documented, with clear citations and a summary of its thinking, making it easy to reference and verify the information. It is particularly effective at finding niche, non-intuitive information that would require browsing numerous websites.
Deep research independently discovers, reasons about, and consolidates insights from across the web. To accomplish this, it was trained on real-world tasks requiring browser and Python tool use, using the same reinforcement learning methods behind OpenAI o1, the company’s first reasoning model.
While o1 demonstrates impressive capabilities in coding, math, and other technical domains, many real-world challenges demand extensive context and information gathering from diverse online sources. Deep research builds on these reasoning capabilities to bridge that gap, allowing it to take on the types of problems people face in work and everyday life.